Writing an obituary is such a hard thing to do. In this one, Jeremy B. Jones manages to honor his grandfather, demonstrate what is important in life, and show us how beautiful prose can be.
When the notable figures of our day pass away, they wind up on our screens, short clips documenting their achievements, talking heads discussing their influence. The quiet lives, though, pass on soundlessly in the background. And yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.
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A close look into a Texas murder. The annotators who train language models. A profile of the man who rode this year’s biggest wave. A personal essay that deep dives into the wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, and an ode to U.S. Army’s new tactical bra.
Bryan Burrough | Texas Monthly | June 20, 2023 | 15,736 words
Looking back over the past couple of years, I realize I don’t often recommend true-crime investigations. Make no mistake: I like a killer-on-the-loose podcast or docuseries as much as the next media omnivore, but the explosion of the genre has sent a lot of true-crime writing into that uncanny valley of journalism that I internally call Please Option This Story and Make Me Rich, Hollywood. All that said, Bryan Burroughs’ lengthy cover story for Texas Monthly falls into no such traps. It’s a curveball that you know is a curveball, yet still dips and weaves and otherwise stymies your expectations. There’s not much I can say by way of synopsis that distills more or reveals less than the story’s headline, so I’ll leave it there; however, know that part of the piece’s excellence lies in its reserve. Another writer might have made Susan Woods’ murder more lurid. Another magazine might have tried to tell the tale in half the length, robbing the characters of their depth. And another form—like the aforementioned podcast or docuseries—might have overweighted the narrative with ominous music cues or hacky video transitions. (Don’t worry: the story also exists as a podcast.) Instead, you get what true-crime journalism can and should be: unsparing, revelatory, and human. A monster’s death doesn’t undo the damage they inflicted, but Burrough’s reporting manages to wring a measure of redemption from the unseemly proceedings. —PR
Josh Dzieza | The Verge / New York Magazine | June 20, 2023 | 7,123 words
I love my work: There’s a singular thrill in discovering excellent writing and/or a new writer and sharing that work with others. It’s like stumbling on a secret. (A former colleague once told me that within 10 years I’d be replaced by a bot able to evaluate great writing at a far faster pace than any human ever could. Then I was skeptical, but now I’m not so sure.) What is certain is that with the rise of AI, jobs are changing. You need actual humans to train the bots so that the bots can become more proficient at what they do. The problem with this work—mostly identifying things in photographs, a process called annotation—is that it’s dull, repetitive, and extremely low-paid. What I loved about Josh Dzieza’s piece at The Verge (in partnership with New York Magazine) is that Dzieza just doesn’t talk to annotators for the story, he becomes one to experience the job for himself. What emerges is a very satisfying read about a particularly unsatisfying aspect of AI’s ever-changing influence on humans and their work. —KS
Gabriella Paiella | GQ | June 13, 2023 | 5,175 words
Gabriella Paiella opens her profile with, “The most remarkable day of Luke Shepardson’s life started in traffic. So much traffic.” With that, Shepardson becomes instantly relatable. We’ve all been there. Most of us don’t beat traffic into work and then go on to win The Eddie, the most prestigious big-wave competition on the planet. Shepardson won it during his breaks, still working his job as the beach lifeguard. This down-to-earth approach suffuses Paiella’s heart-warming piece. While her tender accounts of Shepardson’s family life do not shy away from reality—the family struggles to make ends meet on the expensive North Shore—the focus is on the joy they take in each other. She delights in finding that Shepardson truly appreciates what he has, and remains content with his present successes rather than continually searching for his next big thing. Many of us could benefit from a day at the beach with Casual Luke. —CW
Martha Lundin | Orion Magazine | October 25, 2022 | 2,874 words
When I originally stumbled across Martha Lundin’s piece, I had been hoping for a mention of the late Gordon Lightfoot. The celebrated Canadian musician wrote an epic song to commemorate the wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down in a storm on Lake Superior on November 9, 1975. Lightfoot gets no mention but this piece does not disappoint. Lundin turns Lake Superior into a character by deftly weaving facts and observations about the lake and the ship’s many ill-fated portents, clove-hitched together with the often foreboding female nomenclature used with ships and sailing: “There were omens from the start. At the christening, Elizabeth Fitzgerald had trouble with the champagne bottle. She swung and swung and the bottle would not break. Then the Fitz refused to launch.” What you get is one part education, one part lyrical personal essay in which all hands will find something to savor. —KS
Patricia Marx | The New Yorker | June 19, 2023 | 3,735 words
Who wouldn’t be grabbed by this title (combined with its cartoon illustration of a female soldier hanging from the air by her bra straps)? I certainly was, and Patricia Marx delivers on the promise of fun with her slightly tongue-in-cheek account of all things female military uniform. I could not help but envision Edna Mode (superhero fashion designer from The Incredibles) as Marx heads into the Design Pattern Protype Shop at the Soldier’s Centre in Massachusetts. After all, the designers she meets are in “chic black civvies,” there are areas designated to the Tropics and to the Arctic, and projects “have included a uniform that can change color and one that would enable troops to leap over twenty-foot walls.” These projects make a fire-resistant bra seem a touch tame, but the designers are as earnest about this brassiere as they are reluctant to let Marx squeeze herself into a prototype. (Spoiler: She persuades them.) Marx intermixes her snoop around the center with a deep dive into the history of military uniforms—which is surprisingly fascinating, full of bizarre (and sexist) tidbits such as the fact that in 1943 “[t]he government asked Elizabeth Arden to concoct a lipstick to match the red piping on women’s Marine Corps uniforms.” Neither clothes nor the military usually captures my attention, but I am glad I got sucked into this piece: A thoroughly entertaining read. —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our readers loved most this week:
Carly Lewis | Maclean’s | June 12, 2023 | 5,763 words
Carly Lewis’ report on the murder of Ashley Wadsworth is intense and devastating. But it also demonstrates the standard playbook of abusive men. Lewis is clear: Any history of abuse must be made public and early warning signs must be taken seriously. Wadsworth didn’t need to die. —CW
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The past few years have drastically changed how we think about our relationship to work, perhaps permanently. However, they haven’t changed the fact that billions of people on this planet spend about half their waking hours exchanging labor for money in order to secure food and shelter. As such, work has remained an inescapable part of one’s identity. “What do you do?” is still a small-talk question not because the answer is usually interesting, but because the answer tells you something about the skills and knowledge that person has amassed. And when the answer is interesting, it’s hard not to feel some measure of admiration for someone whose experience falls so outside your own.
I’ve always been fascinated by those whose daily occupations carry meaning, promise adventure, or are in any way out of the ordinary. Of course, everybody’s dream job is different, but imagine swapping sitting at a computer or working on a production line for clearing landmines, dodging tornadoes, or braving the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Not for everyone, of course—but what astonishing ways to earn a living.
The examples you’ll encounter below range from the inspirational to the unfathomable. Who would want to toil 18-hour days, or climb to dizzying heights with little to no protection? For some, that sort of life holds a deep appeal, and herein lies the hook that draws you into these stories: In attempting to understand the motivations of others, we are by reflex attempting to understand ourselves. Each of these pieces moved me in some way, and I hope that they move you also.
Chasing Tornadoes (Priit J. Vesilind, National Geographic, April 2004)
As this mesmerizing article points out, it was the 1996 film Twister that first brought the occupation of “tornado chaser” to widespread public attention. Twister was a big deal upon its release, and I can vividly recall being spellbound by the then-cutting-edge special effects: dark and furious tendrils reaching down from the sky to pluck people, cars, and houses into the sky, spinning like toys, seemingly cut adrift from gravity itself. That film, as all movies do, exaggerated the hazards faced by its protagonists—but, judging by this primary account, not by very much. That meteorologists are still throwing themselves at deadly storms nearly 30 years on tells much of the complexity behind this destructive and spectacular weather phenomenon.
In order to study tornados, you have to get close enough to manually drop heavy probes in their path, sometimes less than 100 meters from an approaching maelstrom. In a way, it’s comforting to know that, for all our technology and sophistication, we are in no way removed from the natural systems that surround us. Nature can always outdo us, will always win. That’s not to minimize the human cost, however, nor the bravery and determination of the tornado chasers. From the very beginning, in which an entire village is sucked into the air, this piece delivers mind-boggling drama, immersing us in a disparate group of specialists who race across the United States to seek out something most others would sooner avoid—all in the interest of furthering our understanding of an uncontrollable phenomenon.
But we’re late, and out of position. If we try to drive around the storm, we won’t have enough daylight left to see it. So we decide to “punch the core” of the thunderstorm, forcing our way into the “bear’s cage,” an area between the main updraft and the hail. It’s an apt name: Chasing tornadoes is like hunting grizzlies—you want to get close, but not on the same side of the river. Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.
And so we head straight into the storm and find ourselves splattering mud at 60 miles an hour (97 kilometers an hour) on a two-lane road, threatening to hydroplane, visibility near zero. Anton is less than comforting. “The hail in the bear’s cage smashes windows and car tops,” he shouts, grinning. “The smaller stuff is kept aloft by the updraft, and only the large chunks fall. It’s like small meteorites banging down. Ha-ha-ha!”
Once again, we encounter a piece that draws aside the invisible curtain to glimpse the grueling efforts that enable our everyday creature comforts—in this case, the world of mobile communications networks. If you’ve ever shuddered at a TikTok video of a worker balanced precariously atop a tower at vertigo-inducing heights, this article probably isn’t for you. Yet, for such a dangerous job—cell tower climbing routinely claims up to 10 times the number of human lives as the conventional construction industry—it pays a relatively modest wage. What is it, then, that drives people to take up such work?
As a project manager quoted in the piece says, “You’ve got to have a problem to hang 150 feet in the air on an eight-inch strap.” Yet the workers featured in this piece, despite some suffering horrible injuries, clearly love their jobs. It’s not hard to understand the buzz that must come from routinely doing something that most people could not (and would not) do, along with sense of freedom that must come with climbing aloft to look down upon the world. As with the cobalt mining industry—itself the subject of another story in this list—there is a dark underside to this business, as sub-contractors routinely cut corners and take risks in the quest for a few extra dollars.
The greatness in Knutson and Day’s article, as with others collected here, lies in its ability to bring to life the stories and personalities of the people whose hard work makes life easier for us all. If you’re reading this on your smartphone, take a moment to consider the often-obscured reality behind mobile technology—a technology that, by its very nature, is largely invisible.
The surge of cell work forever altered tower climbing, an obscure field of no more than 10,000 workers. It attracted newcomers, including outfits known within the business as “two guys and a rope.” It also exacerbated the industry’s transient, high-flying culture.
Climbers live out of motel rooms, installing antennas in Oklahoma one day, building a tower in Tennessee the next. The work attracts risk-takers and rebels. Of the 33 tower fatalities for which autopsy records were available, 10 showed climbers had drugs or alcohol in their systems.
This is where mobile technology begins: the dangerous and dirty business of mining for cobalt, a mineral essential to the construction of smartphones and laptops. As a species we are finally becoming aware that every modern amenity carries an ecological price, and that price is often paid most dearly (and ironically) by nations that are monetarily poor but resource-rich. In our relentless drive “forward,” it is often the most vulnerable who pay the price. Mining is not a calling for these men; it is a necessity.
However, there is hope to be found in this troubling story—specifically, the very fact of its existence. The best journalism reduces global issues to a human scale, and by taking us into the lives of Congolese miners risking life and limb in pursuit of the rare metal, writer Todd C. Frankel forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.
But Mayamba, 35, knew nothing about his role in this sprawling global supply chain. He grabbed his metal shovel and broken-headed hammer from a corner of the room he shares with his wife and child. He pulled on a dust-stained jacket. A proud man, he likes to wear a button-down shirt even to mine. And he planned to mine by hand all day and through the night. He would nap in the underground tunnels. No industrial tools. Not even a hard hat. The risk of a cave-in is constant.
“Do you have enough money to buy flour today?” he asked his wife.
She did. But now a debt collector stood at the door. The family owed money for salt. Flour would have to wait.
Mayamba tried to reassure his wife. He said goodbye to his son. Then he slung his shovel over his shoulder. It was time.
War leaves scars on every country it touches, sometimes literally: one of its most insidious instruments is buried explosives, set to trigger at the touch of a human foot. Land mines have been a topic of discussion for many years, catapulted to the front of the news in 1997, when Princess Diana raised awareness by walking through a field of live explosives in Angola. (She was a guest of the Halo Trust, an organization that undertakes the arduous and dangerous task of clearing such places for the local populace.)
Little can be more terrifying than the knowledge that each step you take could be your last. It’s a sudden, senseless, death, one without discernment or mercy. But in this inspiring story, life comes full circle, as Hana Khider returns to her ancestral homeland of the Sinjar mountains in northwestern Iraq. When Khider was a child, her mother told her stories of the family homeland they were forced to flee; now, as an adult, she works as part of a team of deminers, making that homeland safe once again. As meaningful as this work is, it also carries with it the deadliest of dangers: an average of nine people a day still fall victim to these terrible remnants of conflict.
At the start of this month, a 24-year-old man working for MAG was killed in an explosion at a munitions storage facility in Iraq’s Telefar district – a reminder of the dangers these deminers face every single day. Iraq has around 1,800 sq km of contaminated land (an area bigger than Greater London) stemming from multiple conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Gulf War, the 2003 US-led invasion, and the Isis occupation of 2014. The Iraqi government has a target deadline of February 2028 to clear the country, which Morgan thinks is optimistic. “Last year, operators cleared just over 15 sq km,” he says. Covid-19 hasn’t helped. This year MAG has managed to disarm 1,200 mines; usually it would be 6,750 mines.
We have always projected a certain romance onto the idea of working on the high seas, and a dignity upon those individuals brave enough to do so. For this piece, journalist Andy Cochrane signs up for a week’s work on the fishing boat Silver Spray, one of just 60 such vessels responsible for supplying all of North America with snow crab. Facing long hours, rough water, and freezing conditions, the work is as grueling as could be imagined, but surprisingly Cochrane encounters only good humor, pragmatism, and an inspiring sense of brotherhood amongst the crew.
This is work that is as fundamental to human existence as can be found. People have to eat, after all. But what really strikes me about this piece—and is a sentiment echoed by its author—is the remarkable positivity of the fishermen, which surely can’t be put down to a sense of pride and decent wages alone. Perhaps it’s the extreme conditions and the hardships that help foster such a sense of togetherness and wry determination. Whatever the cause, this is another absorbing peek into a job few of us would wish to undertake.
I was curious how these guys found their way to the industry and how they hadn’t burned out. Attrition is incredibly high, for obvious reasons—freezing temperatures, rough seas and long, exhausting hours. All three laughed off my greenhorn question, and we returned to tips on how I would survive the week.
Jose, an immigrant from El Salvador and father of two, has lived in Anchorage since the ’90s. Quiet, always smiling, and always working, he’s fished his entire career. Leo, raised in Samoa and now living in Vegas, also has two kids. Even with frozen fingers and toes, he never stopped making jokes. Jeffery, who lives half the year in the Philippines with his wife and three kids, would often give me a fist bump and say “you’ll be all right, everyone goes through this” after I puked, which happened 11 more times the first day.
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
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A delightfully fun—yet informative—reported essay on female military garments. Patricia Marx’s breezy tone whips you through this piece and provides a few chuckles along the way.
Today, the Soldier Center’s labs are more Willy Wonka-ish than ever. There are two climate chambers—one designated Tropics, the other Arctic—which can re-create just about any environment on earth in order to test products and the responses of human beings. Want to have your vitals monitored while you cycle on a stationary bike with forty-m.p.h. winds gusting your way, at temperatures of up to a hundred and sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit? You can do it here. Copper mannequins equipped with more than a hundred sensors are used to test hopefully protective garments, to see how soldiers would weather flash-fire scenarios similar to those resulting from an I.E.D.
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This excerpt —adapted from A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder by Mark O’Connell, published by Granta on 6 July—shows O’Connell’s attempts to uncover the psychology behind two brutal murders. In doing so, he begins to question his own role as the reporter of the story. Beautifully written and a real mind-twister.
He gave me a look of almost cartoonish wariness; he knew that I knew who he was. What he could not have known was that my reaction was not just to seeing a famous murderer walking around campus, but to encountering a character from a novel in the realm of supposed reality. It was as though the fabric separating fact from fiction had been torn.
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The SS Edmund Fitzgerald is just one of about 350 ships resting on the bottom of Lake Superior, but it may be the most famous. The ship set sail from northwestern Wisconsin on November 9, 1975 but sadly did not make it to port. Twenty-nine men—including captain Ernest McSorley, who happened to be on his last voyage before retirement—lost their lives after the ship sank in bad weather. For Orion Magazine, Martha Lundin recalls the power of Lake Superior, the ship’s many ill-fated omens, and the sometimes foreboding feminine mystique around sailing nomenclature.
It starts snowing hard in the afternoon, and the Fitzgerald is seventeen miles ahead of the Anderson, visible only on radar. A wave crashes over the deck and breaks one of the fences. The water drags the screeching, twisted metal into the mouth of her, swallows it. Superior presses against the belly of the ship, pushes her sideways. McSorley radios Anderson captain Bernie Cooper: “I have a fence rail down, two vents lost or damaged, and a list. I’m checking down. Will you stay by me till I get to Whitefish?” The Fitz slows down, lets the Anderson gain on her again. There is a sense of safety in proximity.
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Everyone in Amanda Barrett’s immediate family is dead: her husband, her parents, her brother, and her sister, Melissa. This essay is about Melissa—her struggle with addiction, her ugly death, and Amanda’s struggle to come to terms with what happened to Melissa, and why:
When Melissa was using, worry hovered just below the threshold of my conscious thoughts, never not there. When she was sober, especially after our parents died, I mostly liked having a sister. She taught me rehab slang like “future tripping,” which meant focusing on uncontrollable things to come rather than one day at a time. She told me stories about the people she met, like the roommate who asked her about the difference between arugula and a rugelach. The actor I had never heard of who got kicked out for having heroin mailed to him in a bottle of shampoo. The woman who got three DUIs in twenty-four hours—I said I didn’t think that’s what “one day at a time” meant. Melissa laughed and said, “She ended up in prison. Not jail. Prison.”
Sam told me that when the texts from Melissa stopped on Christmas Eve, he knew she was dead. He had been visiting his family in England for the holidays, and though he had returned to San Diego on New Year’s Eve, he couldn’t bring himself to check on her until the next day. He asked the police to go with him because he thought he didn’t have a key to her new apartment, but when they got there, he remembered he did. They made him wait by the door, and when they saw her, they told him not to go inside. As the gurney passed through the doorway, he placed his hand on the black body bag shrouding Melissa’s leg. Even now, he recounts this scene with a strange, tender smile.
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