On March 14, the ski resort owner Vail Resorts made an announcement: the company would pay a new minimum wage of $20 per hour across all of its North American properties. This is the story of how the ski patrollers at Park City fought for this change. Focussing on one patroller and his family, Gloria Liu cuts through the bureaucracy to show how what is sold as a dream life is in fact a daily, dangerous, struggle.
During a lift ride back to the shack, we saw two of Andersen’s teammates on the slope below, tending to a young male skier in a red jacket who was sitting on the snow with his skis lying beside him. One of the patrollers was wrapping the skier’s right knee in an orange splint. Andersen’s radio crackled. Dispatch wanted to know if they could get pickup for three medical calls at once; on the other side of the mountain, patrollers were coordinating an emergency helicopter flight.
When Matt Blake buys a house he finds something unexpected, leading him to explore the house’s history. He uncovers a troubling story that will make you wonder what secrets your home may be hiding.
The more we pulled, the more we saw it – an amorphous black patch, about the size of a double bed, in the centre of the room. Some of the boards appeared chewed up and peppered by flecks of white and grey where there had obviously been some kind of fire. My homebuyer’s survey had mentioned nothing of this.
When the Kohistani family was evacuated out of Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, they did not assume they could duplicate their comfortable existence in Kabul. Lemar Kohistani risked his life time and again to ensure the U.S. forces had fuel for their war. What did the U.S. offer to Kohistani and his family? A home in rural Missouri seven miles away from the nearest grocery store, a place where they only mosque burned down after it had been shot up a decade ago. Due to an ill-equipped refugee system overwhelmed by the influx, the family was placed far from an aunt in St. Louis who could have helped the Kohistanis to navigate life in the U.S., potentially avoiding a tragic outcome for the family’s 14-year-old son, Rezwan.
How did the Kohistanis wind up so cut off from other Afghans? And how did Rezwan end up at a school that didn’t know what to do with him? The answer lies in a cascading series of failures that stretched from a tiny Missouri nonprofit to the White House, which was ill-prepared to handle the human fallout of America’s longest war.
Rezwan was buried on May 6 after a service in the mosque outside Joplin. Dr. Tabassum Saba, a leader of the area’s small Muslim community, started a fundraiser for the family. “Not everyone here is a hatemonger. Not everybody is KKK. But putting families in rural areas is going to be traumatic,” said Saba, who is a psychiatrist. “They would have been better off in many other places.”
The few students who’d befriended Rezwan grieved. A former classmate ran out of her classroom in tears when she saw his seat empty the next morning. “I think this whole thing could have been avoided if there were other Afghan kids and he had a group to be in instead of being alone,” his friend Beard recalled.
Others were callous. One student expressed surprise that Rezwan hadn’t died trying to “blow up the school,” multiple classmates recalled. The boys who had sat at Rezwan’s lunch table before he disappeared were asked about him by investigators. None recognized him. One said, “What’s a Rezwan?”
Midway through 1991’s The Addams Family, young Wednesday Addams attempts to supplement her family’s lost fortunes by selling poison lemonade for a nickel. Not everyone’s a willing customer. “I only like all-natural foods and beverages, organically grown with no preservatives,” a perky Girl Scout tells her, rolling her eyes in an unwitting rendition of today’s Goop-flogging wellfluencers. “I’ll buy a cup if you buy a box of my delicious Girl Scout cookies.”
“Are they made from real Girl Scouts?” Wednesday counters.
In that exchange, a hero was born.
Wednesday Addams is not like other girls. She thinks of homicide when she should be thinking of boys; she guillotines her dolls and sleeps with their discombobulated parts. At summer camp, conscripted into a drowning-rescue exercise, she gladly lets her nemesis sink beneath the water. Pale and large-eyed, fond of funereal garb, she always manages to seem both amused and joyless. But the beauty of Wednesday — or at least the version portrayed by Christina Ricci in The Addams Family and Addams Family Values — is that she wasn’t a maladapted goth waif yearning to find someone who truly understands her. Instead, she brought to the screen a morbid self-acceptance that set her apart, and became a crucial blueprint for a generation of girls developing their own gallows humor.
When she first arrived on screen in 1991, Wednesday Addams was actually like quite a lot of other cinematic girls that came to define the era: goth-lite, hex-loving, homicidal. (Think the high-school coven from The Craft.) But their darkness was almost always meant to be a metaphor for supposed teen girl self-loathing and loneliness. Not Wednesday’s. She loves dark chaos for dark chaos’s sake. Her life’s ambition is to be sentenced to a fiery death by an angry mob for dancing naked in the town square — though, as her parents insist, college comes first. She’s a rebel without a cause who isn’t torn apart by that lack of cause.
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Freeing adolescent girls from the yoke of self-hatred was one of the most subversive parts of the already subversive 1990s Addams family films, which anticipated coming decades of the conservative movement’s culture-war obsession with the (straight, white, Christian) nuclear family. According to screenwriter Paul Rudnick, the title of sequel Addams Family Values was a direct jab at those ideals. “In Republican terms, ‘family values’ is always code for censorship and exclusion, and Republicans still refuse to respect or even acknowledge, for example, LGBTQ families,” Rudnick told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2018 oral history. He called a pivotal scene from the film, in which Wednesday enacts a gory retelling of the first Thanksgiving at predominately blonde, upper-class Camp Chippewa, the “ultimate revenge, on Republicans, blondes, mean girls, and bullies.”
The fact that the film fails to punish or reward Wednesday for taking that revenge is also disruptive in its own way. For hundreds of years, morality tales have either punished girls who stepped out of line or exposed them as being misunderstood and lonely. Wednesday Addams is neither. She is exactly as she appears — what Rudnick calls “something rare: a child with power.” At the end of Values, Wednesday’s would-be boyfriend delivers the kind of soliloquy that teen rom-com characters would have swooned for: “What if you met just the right man, who worshiped and adored you, who’d do anything you say, who’d be your devoted slave? Then what would you do?” Wednesday’s response? “I’d pity him.” She might want a comrade on her crusade to take down self-righteous strivers, but she doesn’t seem to need one.
Sandwiched between overwrought ’80s delicate-flower tropes and the girl-power boom of the mid-’90s, that display of blithe self-reliance became a touchstone for a generation. Nearly 30 years later, Wednesday Addams remains a perfect time capsule of Gen X’s distrust of phoniness — and proof for millennials that the very idea of “a bright side” is an illusion.
Wednesday wasn’t always this way. In Charles Addams’ original New Yorker cartoons that spawned the family, the then-unnamed child was usually silent — an oval-faced, miniature version of her vibrantly morbid mother. It was the 1960s television version of The Addams Family that began to bring Wednesday to life: morose beyond her years, yet still adorable enough for wholesome prime time. But while Wednesday remained mostly seen rather than heard, society at large was busy clutching its pearls over the fates of teenagers. Movies like Rebel Without a Cause introduced overblown fears about middle-class, suburban kids, raising the dreaded specter of “juvenile delinquency.” The ensuing moral panic characterized wayward teens as eschewing tea parties and chastity for alcohol and sex, and even a fascination with death and murder.
That midcentury paranoia spawned a cottage industry of exploitation movies about sullen, out-of-control teenage girls — the Ed Wood-penned The Violent Years chief among them — which in turn became fodder for late 1980s and early 1990s social parody. Heathers, The Craft, and Beetlejuice all featured young female protagonists who were anything but innocent, preferring to resolve their “teenage angst bullshit” with a “body count,” as Heathers’ Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) so eloquently puts it.
Like all films in which Ed Wood had a hand, The Violent Years is terrible. Overblown, sensationalist, and hilarious, the film was released just one year after Rebel Without a Cause. This time, the delinquents were well-heeled teenage girls. Discontent with pretty dresses and suburban respectability, the girls use the freedom of their gifted automobiles to drink, carouse, and murder to tragic consequences. In 1989, Heathers took up this theme to intentionally comedic effect. Dark-haired, large-eyed protagonist Veronica Sawyer would use her own upper-middle-class privilege for revenge against the social injustices of high school — after falling under the spell of her juvenile delinquent boyfriend (Christian Slater), of course.
It wasn’t Ryder’s first such performance. The year previous, Ed Wood devotee Tim Burton had cast her in Beetlejuice as Lydia Deetz, a goth, death-obsessed teenager who writes suicide notes for fun in her wealthy parents’ newly renovated farmhouse. “I am alone,” Lydia writes in one, before revising it for maximum angst: “I am utterly alone.”
But just as the punishment for failing to appreciate suburban values in The Violent Years had been death, the cure for what ailed both Sawyer and Deetz was normalcy. Sawyer eventually vanquished the bad boyfriend and used her killing spree to champion harmony in her suburban high school; Deetz got a nuclear 1950s sitcom family in the form of the ghost parents who haunt her farmhouse. It wasn’t until 1991’s The Addams Family, co-written by Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson (who had worked with Tim Burton on Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, respectively), that the murderous goth girl’s macabre worldview was treated as a feature rather than a bug.
Ricci’s Wednesday was devious, quietly furious, and most importantly, content to be so. “She’s fiendishly smart and never worries about other people liking her,” Rudnick said about his vision for the character. That may sound similar to other late ’80s and early ’90s alternative heroines, but the character’s inner confidence proved a fundamental difference.
In the masterful sequel, Wednesday seemingly exists expressly to discomfit rich white people. The script recognizes Ricci’s acting chops and deadpan delivery by giving Wednesday and her brother Pugsley their own plotline: cut off from their family at mostly-white Camp Chippewa, Wednesday unleashes vengeance upon her oppressively sunny counselors and campmates for no reason other than that she doesn’t want to smile.
When writing stories about teenage girls, there seems to be a shared temptation among screenwriters to tie any rebellious character trait to hormones. Addams Family Values resists this temptation at every turn. Values never ascribes Wednesday’s outlook to cop-outs like loneliness (as with Lydia Deetz) or lust (Veronica Sawyer); her appetite for chaos needs no excuse. “She’s at that age when a girl has one thing on her mind,” Morticia Addams tells the mother of Amanda Buckman (the Girl Scout from the previous movie, still played perfectly by Mercedes McNab).
“Boys?” Mrs. Buckman asks with a condescending smile.
“Homicide,” Wednesday answers.
For an audience of geriatric millennial girls, that exchange — along with Wednesday’s steadfast refusal to seek the belonging, boyfriends, or social status even Beetlejuice and Heathers told us we should want — was a revelation. Later in the film, Wednesday answers her camp counselor’s racist retelling of the first Thanksgiving with arrows, fire, and violence. Wednesday is not looking for acceptance. She is simply amusing herself by confronting a horde of smiling, blonde Disney enthusiasts with a taste of what it would be like to actually be held accountable for the misery upon which their comfortable lives are based.
In current internet culture, the Wednesday Addams aesthetic is stronger than ever before — a response to years of pandemic, recession, crippling student loan debt, Supreme Court decisions over the contents of our uteruses, and the radicalization of a growing number of racist extremists. My former Jezebel colleague Hazel Cills distilled the sentiment two years ago in an essay called “There Are Only 3 Moods: Lobotomy Please, Asteroid Take Me Now, I Hope I Get Abducted By Aliens”:
But truthfully, I can no longer remember a time when I wasn’t casually talking to people about how much we all wanted an asteroid to take us, now. “I want a lobotomy,” a friend will joke, and I’ll casually agree with a grin on my face, as we both settle in to read about a QAnon conspiracy theory seemingly every child on TikTok aged 13 to 19 is gobbling up like popcorn. “When are the aliens taking me?” I’ll say to nobody, scrolling through my horrible Internet feed that nobody is forcing me to looking at.
It’s a Wednesday Addams worldview: looking on the dark side for the sole reason that looking on the bright side seems like a pretty dim thing to do.
In a way, smooth-brain culture is part of a move toward earnestness in response to quite a lot of dark bullshit. (“The Great Irony-Level Collapse,” as Hanson O’Haver called it at Gawker.) When Wednesday Addams roasts her camp counselors over a spit for writing a play in which Indigenous Americans not having shampoo is a punchline, she’s funny, but she’s not joking. She’s also not lonely, not asking for social currency, and she doesn’t need to be punished for not buying into the idea that organic lemonade is the cure for what ails us. Her morbidity doesn’t stem from being a teenage girl — it stems from the fact that stuff sucks, knives are cool, and pretending that the first Thanksgiving was anything but one terrible chapter in an overall horrible story is the actual weird thing to do. Fantasizing about a lobotomy is a normal response to the last three years; believing that a $40 scented candle counts as self-care is not. That’s the lesson Wednesday Addams reinforced in a certain kind of geriatric millennial girl, and it wasn’t one we often heard.
Even though we have supposedly moved into a more enlightened age of feminist media, characters like Wednesday Addams remain outliers. A recent remake of Rebecca removed Daphne Du Maurier’s iconic villain, Mrs. Danvers, from the plot, flattening her into being simply misunderstood. A much-anticipated but largely forgotten reboot of The Craft got too tangled up in questions of witchcraft and consent to depict any memorable teenage girl characters, good or bad. A 2018 animated version of The Addams Family featured Wednesday Addams in a pink dress to make a point about either conformity or rebellion. (The point was unclear.) Save for rare exceptions like Showtime’s Yellowjackets, featuring a grown-up and still magnificent Christina Ricci, stories about death-obsessed teenage girls and women have been effectively pinkwashed, offering their characters no more nuance than the Ed Wood paranoia of old. Only now the message is that the creepy girls should be as loved and accepted as the blonde organic lemon-eaters — rather than the idea that one can simply be A Person Who Does Not Give a Shit.
A new iteration of the Addams family, Wednesday, premieres November 23 on Netflix. The series follows a “sleuthing, supernaturally infused, mystery charting Wednesday,” played by Jenna Ortega, an actor who proved in the macabre You that she could ably embody ’90s Wednesday energy if given a chance. Hopefully, the writers (as well as Tim Burton, who executive-produced the series) will remember the girls who first encountered Wednesday Addams in theaters, the girls who became goth-lite rebels without a cause. Wednesday doesn’t need the dark academic girl-power treatment so common in series like The Umbrella Academy and The Magicians. Let her remain a hero for those who aren’t lonely or self-loathing — those who simply like guillotines and funeral chic. After all, as Wednesday explains in Addams Family Values, we’re only alive because we haven’t waited long enough.
Emily Alford is a writer living in Los Angeles. A former staff writer for Jezebel, her work has also appeared at Gawker, Vox, and Buzzfeed.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
As host ofThe Creative Nonfiction Podcast, Brendan O’Meara is no stranger to talking about the art and craft of storytelling. In this craft-focused excerpt, we’re digging intoEpisode 340, in which he interviewed Atavist editor Jonah Ogles and freelance writer J.B. MacKinnon about his work on the latest issue of The Atavist.
The seduction of “beautiful language,” however you define it, is real. It’s what we feel we must do to make writing “artful.” Yet, that act of imitation can often ring hollow in execution. Often, it’s best to surrender to the story and let some of the more invisible elements — paradoxically — shine brightest.
Enter J.B. MacKinnon, whose recent Atavist feature “True Grit” chronicles the harrowing journey of three cows swept to sea by a hurricane surge. (Should they have called it “Finding Nemoo”? No, but I still wish they had.) It’s what lead editor Jonah Ogles affectionately dubbed a shaggy-dog story: “It meanders quite a bit from the narrative itself to explore other things, but it’s really a fun read — and worth reading and talking about.”
The conversation with MacKinnon includes too many highlights to mention, but I particularly loved his love of stripping back florid language so that a piece’s bones shine through, rather simply a particular sentence.“The entire culture of writing appears to put weight on beautiful language instead of beautiful structure,” he says. “We can really get bound up in trying to produce beautifully written sentences with well-chosen words. You want the beautiful architecture to catch their eye, not just the blackberry vines it’s buried in.”
Please enjoy this excerpt below, and listen to the full episode for more.
These interviews have been edited for clarity and concision.
Brendan O’Meara: Oh, this one was wild.
Jonah Ogles: Yeah, it’s a good one for us to do. This is a classic shaggy-dog story, not your traditional magazine story. It’s a little odd, it meanders quite a bit from the narrative itself to explore other things, but it’s really a fun read — and worth reading and talking about.
What did the pitch look like when it came across your desk?
He hooked us with the cows: a hurricane sweeps some cows out to sea, and some of them survive. So right there you’ve checked the tension box. But he said that he wanted to use that to discuss cows: how little we know about them, what we think we’re learning about them, and what the story might exemplify. We’d had a lot of straightforward, classic, good magazine stories recently, and this one felt different. And I think we were in the mood to do something a little different.
A lot of people think of cows as these dopey dull-witted meat factories unto themselves. But as JB’s reporting shows, their sentience is more on the level of animals that we historically would never consume, and would be horrified if they were treated as poorly as cows.
It’s sort of a sideways way into that. We’ve gotten pitches for exposés of industrial animal agriculture — and don’t get me wrong, I’m sympathetic to that. This approach asks some of the same thorny questions, with a narrative that’s really compelling and keeps you moving through. I had cows when I was growing up; my dad works for the USDA and has literally spent his career working with farmers to raise cows in more holistic ways. So I was like already a believer. And I was still surprised by what the reporting turned up.
I always love getting your insights on the editorial puzzle-solving of each particular piece. When you were reading early drafts and working with James, how did that puzzle manifest itself?
This was one of the easy ones on the editing front; it came in mostly in the form you see it now. We moved a few things around, but most of what I did was trimming. It was really just refining particular arguments and ideas. The big question for me as an editor was, how do we balance this narrative and these interesting philosophical questions with more current-feeling issues like climate change? All I had to do in this one was tighten things up and say, I think we can make our point in this many words. James has been an absolute pleasure to work with and is always really receptive to that.
Take me through how you came to this one.
J.B. MacKinnon: There was this weird, brief media circus around the idea that these cows had somehow swum from one island to another in a hurricane off the coast of North Carolina. It was presented as this quirky feel-good news story. But I thought, “There’s got to be more to this.” It seemed like it had to be more extraordinary than met the eye — and it certainly turned out to be that way.
Oftentimes a great well of story ideas is these things that are momentarily sensational. They’re quirky on the surface, but then the hit-and-run reporters move on, and the narratively driven reporters’ instincts kick in like yours did.
The story also intersected with a story that has been on my mind for some years, which I wrote years ago for an outdoors magazine in Canada. It was about this polar bear that had been radio-tagged, and jumped into the ocean and set off to swim out to the sea ice, which I guess is something polar bears do in Alaska. They’re used to having to swim 100 kilometers or something out to the sea ice. But because of ice retreat, this one swam for 700 kilometers across nine days, continuously swimming. It had a cub with it when it entered the ocean and it didn’t have one by the time it came out. So somewhere along the line, the cub drowned. And it was just this incredible feat of perseverance and sheer physical power, and kind of blew my mind — and my eye has been opened to animal survival stories since then.
So when I saw this story about the cows, one of my first thoughts was, “Can cows even swim? I don’t know how extraordinary this is, but it seems pretty incredible.” And I started thinking that this might be not only just kind of a cool take on the survival story genre, but it might have important things to say about how we relate to cattle.
That can be problematic for people who consume them as food‚ which is a central tenet of your story.
I was kind of pitching this story as The Perfect Storm meets “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace’s famous essay about lobsters and whether we should eat them. That story starts out as this delightful jaunty travelogue to a lobster festival in Maine, and then it turns into a harrowing, Peter Singer-like essay on animal welfare.
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I thought this one had similar potential, because the narrative is incredible. It’s hard to explain how so few cattle survived this swim, when a whole herd of them and horses was washed into the water; how do just three cattle survive this swim, if it didn’t come down in some way to their individual willpower, their conscious desire to stay alive? And if individual cattle have these kinds of capacities, then something more complicated is staring back at us in the meat aisle of the grocery store than I think many of us has considered.
With the three cattle who survived, two might have been driven by their own herd mentality to survive together. And then the central bovine character, if you will, turns out to be with calf, so that suggests an entirely new level of a drive to survive.
This pregnant cow is just a real battler — certainly the orneriest of the cattle, is very difficult to round up and take back home. This is one of the unanswerable questions of the piece. But we do raise it and I do think aloud about it. Was this cow motivated not only by a desire to save its own life, but a desire to save the life of its calf? As I reported deeper into the story, it kept going. First, it’s “some cows swam through a hurricane.” Then I hear that they may be descendants of Spanish colonial cattle who were thrown overboard 400 years ago. Then I hear that one of them was pregnant. Then I hear that the calf was born with one brown eye, and one blue eye. It just kept on giving, and was so fun to work on.
How did you go about the reporting and the research of this, given that the central figures don’t speak?
I thought, “Well, I’ll try to track down anyone who knows the inside of a cow’s head.” And that turns out to be a pretty limited group of people. There really wasn’t much research being done until recently on cows as individuals, or on the psychology of cows, or even how cows communicate with one another. These are not questions that society is hankering to investigate across a history in which we eat a lot of cows. So it’s really only recently that folks have started to investigate these kinds of questions. So I talked to those people, and they were good enough not only to share their research with me, but to actually sit through interviews in which I said things like, “At what point in the journey of these cows do you think they might have experienced loss, or grieved? How would they have communicated to one another as a storm surge set upon them?” They really helped me build scenes that hopefully bring this story to life in the absence of the ability to interview the protagonists.
Anyone doing this kind of work has to be okay asking questions that feel kind of silly. But ultimately, it gets toward, in this case, getting into the headspace of a cow. How have you developed comfort with asking these questions that seem kind of inane on the surface, but fundamentally help shape the story you’re looking to write?
Even just normally reporting scenes, people find that experience very unfamiliar. Most people’s impression of a reporter or a journalist is that they’re going to come and fire some questions at the interview subject about facts, they’re going to get responses, and that’ll be it. And as soon as you’re starting to ask “what color was your jacket?” it changes.
One time I was interviewing some biologists who had shot a wolf, and I asked what kind of guns they had — and it ended up becoming quite an operation to extract that information. They start to wonder why you need these details, and there’s something about probing for details that makes people just naturally suspicious.
I tend to approach it by saying, “Look, I need to paint a picture in words. And I need the reader to be able to see what you saw or experienced within their mind’s eye.” Most people can go along with that. But I also find that it usually requires going back to interviewees more than once, and trying to develop comfort through a bit of relationship building. In this case, the cow people turned out to be amazing people, and they didn’t blink an eye. They were just like, “Let’s walk through this. I want to help make this story come to life.”
In Robert Caro’s memoir,Working, he writes that one of his central questions when he’s interviewing somebody is just, “What did you see? If I were standing over your shoulder, What would I be witnessing?” It seems so banal to the person asked, but when you get to that degree of granularity, it paints a three-dimensional picture that really immerses the reader. And that’s ultimately what we’re after.
I’ve used exactly that line: If I was standing there beside you, what would I be seeing? All of this really came to a head during COVID, when you couldn’t travel, you couldn’t go to locations and paint scenes. A lot of the detailed description that appears in the piece doesn’t come from my actual visit to the location — it comes from sitting right where I’m sitting now, at the desk that I work at, and talking to people on Zoom or on the telephone.
And when you get all your information together from your reporting and your research, at what point do you feel confident to start writing?
There’s that old phrase, “When you meet yourself coming the other direction.” I think that really has been my experience: At some point, I’m talking to people who are saying, “You should talk to so and so,” and it’s somebody I’ve already spoken to. Or I’m reading research that’s saying something that’s already in my notes. Once I’ve kind of started hitting enough indicators like that, then I feel like, okay, I’ve pushed it far enough along. It’s time to put something on the screen.
Are you much of an outliner?
I spent a lot of time earlier in my career thinking about structure, probably because it was a weakness initially. And so I used to do a lot of outlining, a lot of doodling around structure. At this point, I’ve ingested structure to the point where I generally have a pretty plain sense of how a piece is going to start, where I think it’s going to end, what the basic blocks are within it, what the arc is, all of those kinds of things. The great thing about having gone through the agony of focusing on structure for a while is that it’s become intuitive.
I suspect through all your reading, and all the stories you’ve written, and all the research you’ve done, that — to use a golf term — you can kind of see the line.
You start to develop an eye for themes and threads rising up through the research as you do it. In this case, the idea of names and naming started to rise up for me. We generally don’t name livestock, because we’re going to eat them. In this case, though, there was this strange circumstance where you have these two herds of feral animals, one of horses and one of cows, and they all get swept off this island by a storm surge. But when I started to look into it, all of the horses have names — and of course, none of the cows have names. But yet, it’s the cows that survive. And at the very end, one of the cows is awarded a name by the human community. So I was picking up those kinds of resonances, and pretty quickly that turned into knowing how I’m going to start my story: not with the cows, but with the horses, because they have names. “Oh yeah, and there were also some cows. They didn’t have names, but hang around and see what they do.”
What was it like being edited on a piece of this nature? Because it’s an ambitious piece of writing — but, of course, it’s also an ambitious piece to edit.
I think, oddly enough, this was my first real effort to start trying stories that had strong narratives at their core. Prior to this, I’d really written more essayistic styles, particularly reported essays. Those would have storytelling elements, but they weren’t really powerfully narrative-driven.
I’m more or less self-taught as a writer. I didn’t study it in university. So I probably was a bit shy about approaching narrative-driven stories. But after this last book, I was really craving the opportunity to write something with a powerful narrative. It powers itself, right? You don’t have to crunch it as much as you do an essay. It’s difficult in new ways, but narratives are a lot clearer in terms of “what’s the start, middle, and end?”
That’s where the editing from Jonah has been really helpful. He basically said, “The diversions in this piece are fun, but there’s a lot of them. And we really need to let the narrative rise up and breathe.” That was really a pleasure for me, because I could recognize right away that this was something I needed to learn about pieces that are powered by narrative. It was beautiful to watch how stripping things away allowed it to become so much more visible.
If you’re decluttering your wardrobe and get rid of a T-shirt, it stings at first, but in a week, a month, a year, you don’t even remember that you had the thing. It’s the same thing when you’re line editing and killing darlings. Some things seem so precious, but when you strip it away in service of the whole, you’re like, “I don’t even remember why line seemed so important to me.”
The entire culture of writing appears to put weight on beautiful language instead of beautiful structure. We can really get bound up in trying to produce beautifully written sentences with well-chosen words. You want the beautiful architecture to catch their eye, not just the blackberry vines it’s buried in.
In bringing these conversations down for a landing, I always love asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners — it can be anything, be it a brand of coffee or a fanny pack.
I’m actually going to give a little shoutout for what may be an underappreciated nonfiction outlet, Hakai Magazine. They’re a great literary science magazine up here in British Columbia, and doing all kinds of really interesting stuff. It feels like a place where, as a writer, the reins are kept pretty loose, and you get to breathe a little when you’re doing a piece. I think it’s a place that deserves more readers — and more writers as well.
In this alphabetical guide combining narrative, reporting, and illustration, Elizabeth Kolbert tells the story of Earth across the ages.
To say that amazing work is being done to combat climate change and to say that almost no progress has been made is not a contradiction; it’s a simple statement of fact.
For the last thirty years—more if you go back to 1965—we have lived as if someone, or some technology, were going to rescue us from ourselves. We are still living that way now.
A gripping nature thriller. The sleep diary of an insomniac. The golden years of a digital media empire. River rocks etched with history. Musings on returning to one’s hometown. Read on for our editors’ five recommended stories.
J.B. MacKinnon | Hakai Magazine | November 15, 2022 | 14,400 words
In recent years, we’ve witnessed the blossoming of a subgenre of longform writing that I’ll call the nature thriller. It’s born of necessity, by which I mean the collision of an ever-expanding human population — we hit 8 billion souls just this week — and a changing, temperamental climate. Natural disasters are on the rise, and with them come harrowing stories of jaw-dropping devastation and remarkable survival. In the right hands, these stories are propulsive without feeling glib, emotional but not exploitative. J.B. MacKinnon is a master of the nature thriller, deftly weaving plot with science. In this multi-chapter feature about the worst flood British Columbia has ever seen, MacKinnon had me on the edge of my seat reading about storm patterns, pressure systems, and infrastructure — yes, infrastructure. I learned from this story as much as I enjoyed it. (Sidenote: I had the pleasure of helping shepherd another MacKinnon feature, “True Grit,” to publication at The Atavist this month. It too qualifies as a nature thriller.) —SD
Rachel Handler | Vulture | November 6, 2022 | 7,169 words
I am not a good sleeper. My room needs to be frosty cold and my bed toasty warm, one foot tucked in and one out, to monitor conditions. A sea of devices cover my bed, distractions to stop my brain from using sleep “quiet time” to catch up on some important worrying. So I was drawn to Rachel Handler’s essay detailing her struggles with insomnia. Jam-packed with fascinating information, it starts with a new study published in the Journal of Sleep Research which, contrary to popular belief, suggests being on your devices before bed may aid sleep. She decides to put this to the test by peer-reviewing herself. For two weeks, she keeps a sleep diary, bizarre dreams and all, to measure the effects of her nightly TV. Sure, it might not be the most scientific study in the world, but her honest appraisal is nothing short of hilarious. Give it a read — on your screen in bed if you want. I support you. —CW
Mia Sato | The Verge | November 16, 2022 | 3,263 words
It’s not easy being on top. Or, rather, it’s not easy being on top when staying there is virtually impossible. Once upon a time, BuzzFeed reigned supreme among digital media upstarts, seemingly minting both page views and revenue at will; today, it’s losing millions of dollars every quarter, and readers are spending a third less time with it than just a year ago. Is this a fall from grace or a Sunset Boulevard moment (“I’m big … it’s the pictures that got small”)? The answer, as Mia Sato unpacks in this Verge feature, is a little bit of both. As hard as it was for legacy outlets to adjust to the internet, BuzzFeed knew exactly how to package it for readers — and in return, readers fed BuzzFeed not just eyeballs, but ideas. The Dress; ’90s-kid nostalgia plays; even harnessing Facebook’s then-new live video capability. Time moved on, though, and the algorithms did too. Quizzes and listicles have fallen out of fashion, and you can’t scroll Twitter without seeing a handful of other aggregation engines repurposing Reddit threads and TikTok trends. The circle of franken-content remains unbroken. That doesn’t mean that BuzzFeed employees don’t look back fondly, though, and Sato does a stellar job of tracing why the site’s heyday was so damn powerful. It wasn’t just the memes; it was the friendships they made along the way. —PR
Anna Badkhen | Emergence Magazine | September 13, 2022 | 1,828 words
In considering time trapped in a bead of amber, Anna Badkhen reflects on how our planet’s weather patterns have raged across eons. With horrific drought in Europe that saw rivers run dry this past summer, Badkhen reminds us that humans have inscribed their suffering on “hunger rocks” that appear in rivers only when the water level becomes precipitously low or disappears altogether. “In Central Europe, hunger stones—river boulders that people living through droughts petroglyphed with dates and descriptions of their woe—commemorate the years of bad harvest, scarcity, high prices, hunger: 1417, 1616, 1707, 1746, 1790, 1800, 1811, 1830, 1842, 1868, 1892, 1893. One inscription, near Bleckede, in Lower Saxony, reads: ‘When this goes under, life will become more colorful again’; another, near the Czech town of Děčín-Podmokly: ‘If you see me, then weep.’” Badkhen’s essay is a poignant reminder of the magnitude of our planet’s ongoing evolution and the split-second brevity of a human life lived on it. —KS
Anne P. Beatty | The Rumpus | October 18, 2022 | 3,165 words
Anne P. Beatty never planned to move back to her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. But at 33, she did. In these lovely musings, Beatty reflects on ambition, becoming a writer and an English teacher, and the fear of stasis when a person returns to the place they grew up. She also writes beautifully about adolescence and adulthood — what we hope for ourselves, and simply what is. “As a kid, I was constantly looking beyond myself, beyond my world. What’s out there to see? To write about?” she asks. “Now, I just want one more hour, thirty minutes even, to work from within.” I’ve been thinking deeply recently about where I am in my life — struggling as a mother, trying to be a writer — and I appreciate these refreshingly honest reflections about life and growing up. —CLR
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