A new East Village restaurant is serving galouti kebab, a stable of Lucknow, the hometown of Jaya Saxena’s father. In this lovely essay, Saxena explores the delight of finding this cultural experience in her hometown, while recognizing it as a different experience to eating the kebab in India. I enjoyed that rather than being disappointed, she acknowledged this difference: “The hometowns are not the same, but now a piece of one is available in the other.”
We sat in a lofted seating area, looking down on the man forming kebabs with one hand, lining the patties on the edge of a plate for another cook to fry. Eating them, I felt a tingling heat I’d never experienced. The chile mellowed beneath the other spices, all of them building and building until I felt my consciousness lift three inches past my brow, like the last time I’d successfully smoked a joint. My cousin and I were giddy, sweeping up the kebab with roomali roti and washing it down with Limca, barely able to form sentences but in complete agreement this was a meal we’d remember forever. My grandfather beamed, I’m not sure whether for himself or for us.
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A fifty-year-old story is dusted off after a camera belonging to a deceased climber emerges from a receding glacier on Aconcagua, the Western Hemisphere’s highest mountain. What will the undeveloped photos tell us about an incident that may have been a climbing accident, but also may have been murder? John Branch conducted dozens of interviews and went on several reporting trips for this meticulous report. Combined with videos from Emily Rhyne, it is part adventure story, part murder mystery, and races along like a thriller.
More clues emerged from the ice. Here was a decomposed left arm, still wearing a delicate silver Rado watch with a broken blue face. There was a tattered pack and scattered belongings: down mittens, a red jacket, a single crampon, a canister of used Kodak film.
Like that, by the whims of climate change and chance, a long-lost legend was given air and light.
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Seth Freed Wessler | ProPublica | December 7, 2023 | 8,359 words
Since summer 2021, the US Coast Guard has detained more than 27,000 people at sea, including an alarming number of Haitian refugee children traveling alone. Immigration policy offshore is different than on land—asylum doesn’t apply at sea—and the system in place, reports Seth Freed Wessler, is opaque and dangerously inconsistent. Coast Guard immigration patrols are often closed off to journalists, but Wessler obtained internal documents about one boat detained in March that carried a group of Haitians, including three unaccompanied children: a 10-year-old boy and two sisters, 8 and 4. Wessler tracked down these kids, along with 18 others from the boat. He does an incredible job recounting the experience from the boy’s perspective: Tcherry started his journey at a smuggler’s house in the Bahamas and endured 12 hours inside the packed cabin of a shabby boat. The plan was to land in Florida, and then somehow make his way to Canada to join his mother. (There are many heartbreaking details in this story, but one I can’t get out of my head is that some kids on these boats are so young, they don’t even know their parents’ names or the country in which they were born.) After five days at sea, the Coast Guard has no choice but to send Tcherry and the two girls back to Haiti. As Wessler notes, detainments at sea aren’t just scarring for refugees: the work has taken a toll on Coast Guard members, too, such as the conflicted officer who encounters Tcherry and the girls on the boat—and later wonders what has become of them. A gut-wrenching look into the immigration crisis at Florida’s maritime border. —CLR
Stuart McGurk | The New Statesman | December 7, 2023 | 6,664 words
Online dating is a daunting world. There are many questions to consider about the person an app plucks from the ether and plops down onto your screen as a potential partner. Will we connect? Are you funny? Are those your actual teeth? But nowadays, one question has become paramount: are you real? As Stuart McGurk explains in this fascinating piece, romance deception is the fastest-growing category of fraud. It increased by almost a third last year, and now a staggering “two in five online daters have been asked for money, and half of those gave it.” (These types of stats seem destined only to grow with the rise of AI.) McGurk profiles Constable Rebecca Mason, a detective so dedicated to tracking down online fraudsters she puts in 20-plus-hour investigative shifts. I can see why she cares so much: when she meets the victims, it is heartbreaking. In the case of Alan Baldwin, the need to believe is so strong that when Mason breaks the news that the person he has loved—and sent money to—for 15 years does not exist, he won’t believe it. The targets of these scams are the emotionally vulnerable, longing for a connection, and desperate to help the person they care for. Particularly chilling is the pithy description of the scamming network’s WhatsApp group chat; like a gaggle of young girls discussing the best response to send a crush, the scammers talk about what replies will keep their targets on the hook. It’s a sickening thought. McGurk distills Mason’s meticulous work—and the reams of online messages—into a clear, sharp piece that, satisfyingly, goes all the way to a trial and conviction. (For further reading on dating fraud, I also highly recommend a feature from our sister publication, The Atavist: “The Romance Scammer on my Sofa.”) —CW
Jon Mooallem | The New York Times Magazine | December 3, 2023 | 7,960 words
To say that I was excited to read this profile is a ridiculous understatement. R.E.M. is my favorite band. (“Nightswimming” is my favorite song—a sentimental choice, but whatever, I own it.) And I wasn’t disappointed. There are delightful appearances by Taylor Swift, Stipe’s 87-year-old mother, and best of all Patti Smith, who is one of his closest friends. The story of how Smith and Stipe met is one for the ages: he got her number from a friend and called her from a bar in Spain on the first Valentine’s Day after Smith’s husband died, because he thought it might be nice. “I wouldn’t be calling except that I’m completely drunk on absinthe,” he told her. Little did he know that Smith had a crush on him, just from watching MTV. (Same, Patti.) But the best part of this profile is how author Jon Mooallem captures Stipe’s unique energy, which is at once radiant and humble. One of the greatest frontmen in the history of pop music is working on his first solo album, and that means harnessing an eternally restless mind, transcending self-doubt, and forcing himself to step away from a life populated by friends and family to whom he’s fiercely devoted. “He knew he’d have to isolate himself in one of the buildings on his property,” Mooallem writes, “walk in circles for six or eight or 10 hours at a time, effect a trancelike meditation and wrench out the rest of the lyrics, line by line.” For now, Stipe’s songs-in-progress live on his laptop in a folder called “Master file. Solo album.” That pop you just heard? It’s my heart exploding. —SD
Ben Lerner | Harper’sMagazine | November 20, 2023 | 8,414 words
To be completely honest, I don’t know if this qualifies as nonfiction—the eyebrow “Experiment” sitting above the headline gives you some clue what you’re in for—but I do know it’s far and away the most daringly executed thing I read all week. On its face, it’s a memoir detailing how Lerner moved across the country in his mid-20s to work as a progressive think tank’s “new media fellow” and ended up creating a disinformation campaign via Wikipedia. There’s just one issue: he destabilizes our experience at every possible turn. His memory is faulty, he tells us. He’s lying. The details are wrong. Lerner is best known for his literary fiction (autofiction, really) and poetry, both of which beat at the heart of this piece. It’s a dizzying, disorienting read, but it’s also so smartly constructed and beautifully written that you can’t help but press on. It all still holds true, even if he’s making up or misremembering the details. At least, it seems to, and that’s the point. We’ve constructed a system in which establishing fact is simply a function of building the right illusion. Unreliable narrators come and go, bringing with them the intermittent uproar of a philosophical debate. What debt do writers owe the truth? But at this moment of transition, with the black box of artificial intelligence beginning to reshape the textual web, it’s far more troubling to realize that it’s not just the narrators who are unreliable—it’s the architects, too. —PR
Kiese Laymon | The Bitter Southerner | December 6, 2023 | 1,914 words
The Bitter Southerner just published Kate Medley’s Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed & Fuel the American South, a “photographic road trip” documenting service stations, convenience stores, and pit stops across the South. This essay by Kiese Laymon is the book’s foreword. At one point I seriously considered writing a recommendation for this piece that simply read: “Kiese Laymon. That’s all you need to know.” But that would have robbed me of the opportunity to reread and savor the bounty of this essay. If you do not know Laymon’s work, do yourself a favor and read this piece. Here, he takes us back to his childhood in 1984 and the Friday nights spent with his grandmama and her boyfriend Ofa D at Jr. Food Mart: a diner, convenience store, and gas station in Forest, Mississippi. “I loved everything about where we were going,” he writes. “I loved the smell of friedness. I loved the way the red popped in the sign. I loved how the yellow flirted with the red. I loved that the name of the restaurant started with Jr. instead of ending in Jr. Like, Food Mart Jr.” It’s a captivating read about anticipation, finding joy in a place you might not expect, and the long hours worked at minimum wage that made that joy possible. At Jr. Food Mart, Laymon, his grandmama, and Ofa D got oh so much more than fried fish and ‘tato logs for a yummy Friday night supper; they got a hefty helping of love and care and history served up to go. —KS
Audience Award
Congratulations to the most-read editor’s pick this week:
Amelia Tait | The Guardian | December 2, 2023 | 4,045 words
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. —SD
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For soccer/football fans, there’s nothing quite so dispiriting as the strain of racist hooliganism that often accompanies live matches. Israel is by no means immune to that, as Amos Barshad’s feature makes clear. La Familia, a loose organization of fans who support the club Beitar Jerusalsm, has in recent years become even more vocally anti-Arab. Yet, a corrective exists in the followers of a crosstown rival—one of whom is currently held as a hostage by Hamas. A fascinating look at a little-known facet of Israel’s internal tensions.
During the wave of anti-government protests that have swept Israel on and off since at least 2020, La Familia has frequently appeared as a counter-ballast to shout down and assault activists and journalists. Seeking confrontation, they roam and chant things like “Muhammad is dead” and “This is the Jewish state, I hate all the Arabs,” and “Where are the whores of antifa?” One government minister has proposed declaring them a terrorist organization.
Beitar Jerusalem has a local rival in the city’s historic left-wing team, Hapoel Jerusalem. While professional sports teams are almost exclusively owned by the ultra-wealthy, Hapoel is fully fan-owned. The club’s stated beliefs: coexistence and cross-Jerusalem solidarity between Muslims and Jews. As one Hapoel supporter told me, its fans aspire to be La Familia’s “antithesis.”
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Is this essay? Memoir? Fiction? Something else entirely? I’m still not sure. But Ben Lerner’s Harper’s cover story—which, to put it most simply, recounts the time in his mid-20s he turned Wikipedia into a propaganda machine—manages to be as compelling as it is slippery.
Let’s say that I, having looked for any excuse to flee Brooklyn, had moved to the East Bay for a “new-media fellowship” at the linguist’s institute. I rented the first apartment I looked at, a studio I couldn’t afford in the rear of a yellow Arts and Crafts building on Derby Street, half a mile from the Berkeley campus. My windows opened onto a back garden with lemon and magnolia trees. I went to the Ikea in Emeryville and then, praying nobody would steal my boxes, had a ten-minute consultation in downtown Oakland with a doctor my sister had recommended, so I could get my medical marijuana prescription. Back “home” in my apartment, I unloaded and assembled a coffee table, two chairs, and a queen-size bed. See the little hex key. I’m alarmed to recall I got my mattress for free off Craigslist from a floridly insane woman who was wearing a bathrobe over her sweatshirt and jeans. I did not get bedbugs, but that first night in my apartment I seemed to dream the woman’s dreams. A man was chasing me (but I wasn’t me) down Telegraph with a knife, yelling that the knife was mine, that he just wanted to return it to me.
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At the time of this writing, Longreads editors have created nearly 650 recommendations in 2023, and just about every one of them can be considered a feature. However, you’ll find that the stories contained herein are features in the classic sense: marriages of deep reporting and indelible prose. Some are light, others emotionally taxing. Their subjects range from subcultures to ideas to life itself. And just as they do every year, they represent the very best that narrative journalism has to offer. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.
Keri Blakinger | The Marshall Project | August 31, 2023 | 4,440 words
This piece by Keri Blakinger is an extraordinary look at how world-building, through the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, became a form of escape for incarcerated men in Texas. The story centers around two men, Tony Ford and Billy Wardlow, both of whom land on death row as young adults and meet in the late ’90s in Polunsky, one of the most restrictive death row units in the US. Through D&D, the men transcend their utterly isolating circumstances to find both camaraderie and a therapeutic outlet. Despite death row’s restrictive conditions, D&D crews find a way to play—passing secret notes from cell to cell, constructing handmade game spinners in lieu of dice, and hand-drawing detailed maps and character sheets, the latter of which are included in the piece and offer a peek into the vast worlds they built, and the personas they developed and inhabited. (Wardlow’s magical alter ego, Arthaxx d’Cannith, was a better version of himself—one that had never shot and killed a man during an attempted robbery.) “Sometimes, through their characters, they opened up about problems they would never otherwise discuss,” writes Blakinger, “unpacking their personal traumas through a thin veil of fantasy.” Like the intricate worlds Ford and Wardlow imagined, Blakinger—herself formerly incarcerated—builds this world behind bars in a way only she can. I wondered at first whether to call this piece uplifting, given the fates of most death-row prisoners. But Blakinger beautifully illustrates here the transformative power of storytelling and play, and how humans can come together to spark a bit of hope in the most unexpected places. —CLR
Peter Flax | Bicycling Magazine | January 31, 2023 | 8,136 words
Twelve-year-old Molly Steinsapir was riding an e-bike with her friend on a residential street in California called, of all things, Enchanted Way, when she crashed and suffered injuries she would not survive. Her parents sued the bike manufacturer, claiming it was liable for Molly’s death. Peter Flax tells this tragic story exceedingly well by all the traditional measures of feature-writing (excellent prose, delicate tone). But this piece has stuck with me all year chiefly for two other reasons: because it delves into Big Questions about the human toll of rapid innovation, ones that go well beyond the e-bike industry, and because it demonstrates the incredible value of niche magazines. Flax used to be the editor-in-chief of Bicycling, and he is himself an avid cyclist. His expertise and insight elevate the story. So does the fact that the magazine let him go deep on the mechanics and economics of e-bikes, as well as the community of consumers who know this increasingly popular equipment better than anyone else. Put another way, this is an insider’s story. But to this outsider—I am not a cyclist—it still feels both accessible and urgent. It changed the way I view the e-bikes zipping up and down my block. Maybe it will do the same for you. —SD
Xenia Minder | FT Magazine | December 21, 2022 | 4,475 words
I first stumbled upon this piece last year, in that blur of days between Christmas and the New Year, when time is lost to endless cycles of family conversations and cheese. It made enough of an impression on me to not only cut through the haze of over-indulgence but to stay in mind for the whole year. (As it was published after our “Best of 2022” was released, it still qualifies for this year’s list.) Xenia Minder tells her story to her brother, Raphael Minder—the Financial Times Central Europe correspondent—and I do not doubt that the closeness of this relationship helped the Minders create such a vivid, candid account. As the title suggests, it is the story of three catastrophic falls. In one, Xenia breaks her back, resulting in months in a back brace, and in the other two, she loses men she loves—first Erhard Loretan, then Jean-François. I live near a mountain resort, where tales of big falls are part of the mantra, but not three, not with such consequences. Searing sentences pull the reality of such tragedy brutally to the surface, with Erhard being found “still tied to my waist. I never realized that he had been right there, within touching distance,” while “Jean-François died on the mountain that he knew like the back of his hand.” But while the descriptions of the events are powerful, Xenia’s thoughtful reflections—and her pragmatism and strength—struck me most about this piece. She reminds us “that key events in our lives are unknown to us, particularly the moment of our death” and comes to see herself as just a tenant inside her own body. Quitting her job as a judge in Geneva, she starts a new chapter feeling both “light” and “solid,” moving to a chalet on the outskirts of a village—in the mountains. Combined with some beautiful, otherworldly photography from Olivo Barbieri, it’s haunting, poetic, and inspiring. —CW
Jana G. Pruden | The Globe and Mail | June 2, 2023, | 3,231 words
Jana G. Pruden takes us into the frenzy that is the Canadian National Cheer Championships, a space blaring Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, arcing with the energy of sparkly young heroines who “compete by performing short, highly technical acrobatic routines in unison at the highest energy, with scores based on execution, difficulty, creativity and showmanship.” Pruden goes behind the sequins to discover that while cheer requires much from those who compete, the sport welcomes every body shape and size including “small flyers, lithe tumblers,” and “powerful bases” who each have their own precise and perfect role to play in helping their squad to “hit zero”—cheer speak for an error-free performance. “There is nothing quite like cheer, which combines the hyper-feminine aesthetic of a pageant with the posturing and swagger of boxing, the performative flair of pro wrestling, the tribal fandom of football and the raucous atmosphere of a rock concert,” writes Pruden. Streamers and glitter aside, cheer is serious—and dangerous—business. Participants get injured, sometimes severely, while performing their physically and mentally demanding routines. Vomit buckets stand ready and a clean-up protocol is in place should the intensity of performance press such buckets into service. Pruden fortifies you with this and oh, so much more necessary (and fascinating!) background information to prepare you for an intense, high-flying finale that will leave you cheering for more. —KS
Virginia Heffernan | Wired | September 26, 2023 | 3,874 words
Quick, name the topic you got most tired of reading about in 2023. Assuming you didn’t mention a certain musical artist who managed both a #1 tour and a #1 movie, I’m gonna go ahead and guess your answer involved two letters: A and I. (Sure, said musical artist’s name also involves those two letters, but let’s not get caught up in technicalities.) It’s been just over a year since ChatGPT became available to the general population, and in those 12 months we’ve seen everything from “AI will save the world” to “AI could destroy humanity,” with nearly every flavor of equivocation in between. But none of that makes for a good story, and that’s exactly why Virginia Heffernan’s Wired feature was a lock for my pick in this category. Nominally about Cicero, an AI model created to play the strategy game Diplomacy, the piece contends with AI’s potential less than it does human psychology. Heffernan correctly pegs that much of our discomfort with chatbots lies in their ersatz personalities. “An entity that feigns human emotions is arguably a worse object of affection than a cold, computational device that doesn’t emote at all,” she writes. Enter Cicero, and its programmers’ quest to make it unbeatable at a game that is, at its heart, about negotiation. Not deception or guile, but finding a path forward so that both sides benefit. Diplomacy isn’t an end in itself, but rather a means: how can AI relate better to people, and how can we reach a state of allyship and even trust, something more R2-D2 than HAL? (That Cicero is a Meta project goes only lightly acknowledged here, but it certainly makes Cicero’s victory over the world’s best Diplomacy player feel just a touch more ominous.) Heffernan is the perfect writer for this kind of piece—she’s long found the joy in everything from semiconductors to particle physics—though it also may just be that this wouldn’t be a piece in another writer’s hands. Either way, consider it the one AI story this year that’s not just thought-provoking, but narratively satisfying. —PR
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Have you been wondering what the frontman of R.E.M. is up to these days? Me too. And veteran feature-writer Jon Mooallem has answers in this profile, his last project at The New York Times Magazine before he takes his talents to The Wall Street Journal. Here’s a scene with music producer Jack Antonoff and Matty Healy of the band 1975 (yes, Taylor Swift is also in the story):
Eventually, Stipe revealed to Antonoff and Healy that he was at Electric Lady working on his first solo record. (Healy responded with a drawn-out and reverent four-letter word.) Stipe had no qualms about sharing how tough the process had been so far, and how slow-going. Later he’d tell me: “I’m wildly insecure. I have impostor syndrome to the [expletive] max.” Sometimes Instagram served him clips of R.E.M. concerts, and he wondered: Where did it come from, the audacity to do that in front of tens of thousands of people? He told Antonoff and Healy, “It’s hard to be in competition with your former self.”
He said this with disarming sweetness. Antonoff tried to buck him up. He explained that, when he’s making something, he finds he just needs a few songs he’s proud of to make the entire project start to feel sufficiently sturdy. “You can wear them as armor,” he said.
But Stipe disagreed — definitively. He could remember, as a kid, adoring certain records, then hitting some total stinker somewhere on Side B and not being able to forgive the band for it.
For him, one weak song could ruin a whole album. It stained everything else.
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