The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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In this week’s edition:

• Interracial persecution in 1960s Michigan
• The cruelty bred into the chickens we eat
• How Photo Shuffle helped one man through loss
• Navigating life not knowing you’re neurodivergent
• The deep craft in forging a handmade knife

1. In 1967, a Black Man and a White Woman Bought a Home. American Politics Would Never Be the Same.

Zack Stanton | Politico Magazine | December 22, 2023 | 17,959 words

The starting point for this mammoth feature by Zack Stanton is a little-known incident from the summer of 1967: a white mob tried with all their might to drive Carado and Ruby Bailey, an interracial couple, from the suburban Michigan neighborhood where they’d recently bought a new home. Drawing on interviews, public records, and press accounts, Stanton describes the horrors the Baileys and their daughter endured, including a cross burning, racist graffiti, and harassment by vigilante PTA moms who sound a whole lot like the women trying to ban books and marginalize transgender youth in schools today. But that’s not the whole story, or even half of it. In cinematic detail, Stanton shows how the battle over the Baileys’ home reached all the way to Washington, DC, where it might have shaped federal policy for the better if not for profound conservative backlash that instead helped usher in Republicanism as we know it today. I gobbled up this thick slice of forgotten history and was moved by the turn at the end when Stanton lets his sources directly address Ruby, now 95, a widow, and still living in the home she refused to leave. One source “admires your principle in the face of imminent danger,” Stanton writes. Another “wants people to understand that America isn’t simply a story of bad things that have happened; it’s the story of people trying to make things better.” Then there is the neighbor who watched from her window in ’67 and did nothing—today, she is ashamed. “When I asked what she would say to you if given the chance,” Stanton tells Ruby, “she broke down in sobs, a half-century’s worth of pain tumbling out.” —SD

2. The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

Boyce Upholt | Noema | December 19, 2023 | 3,954 words

Last week I roasted a chicken. I’ve eaten chicken probably three times since then. I’m careful about the chicken I buy and cook and eat, and as a one-time vegetarian I like to think that I do so mindfully, but even as I do I harbor a suspicion that something is irrevocably broken. That phrases like “free range” and “heritage breed” and “regenerative practices” add up to very little. Boyce Upholt’s Noema story did nothing to disabuse me of that suspicion, and I mean that as a compliment. The quest he refers to in the headline isn’t one that’s currently underway; it’s something that happened long ago. And while we certainly need “better” in the way we raise and slaughter animals for consumption—sorry, fellow meat-eaters, but there’s no use for euphemisms here—”better” here is meant in an industrial sense. It means bigger. Much bigger. So much bigger that decades of exhaustive and meticulous cross-breeding have led to a domesticated chicken that is virtually unable to live on its own. PETA videos exposing factory-farming practices are all well and good, but as Upholt writes, the true atrocity lies well upstream: “The cruelty, in other words, is inscribed at the genetic level.” He’s not trying to guilt you about eating meat; he does so himself. (Besides, as he lays out ably, there’s not really a viable solution to the current situation.) Rather, by tracing the arc of the chicken from its initial domestication to its current fate, and by doing so with an engagingly nonjudgmental writing voice, he’s just making sure you know exactly what’s happened. Winner, winner, thought-provoking dinner. —PR

3. A Second Life for My Beloved Dog

Charlie Warzel | The Atlantic | January 5, 2024 | 1,500 words

I am the sort of person who, when watching a disaster film, will anxiously ask: “But, is their dog alright?” So—normally—I avoid any story where the dog might not, in fact, be OK. However, I conquered my fear to tackle Charlie Warzel’s essay about the death of his dog, Peggy (also the name of my dog, for extra potential trauma), and was rewarded with a beautiful, heartwarming piece. As any pet owner knows, the arrival of an animal means clogging your phone with endless photos: The pet sleeping. The pet playing. More sleeping. Charlie Warzel’s iPhone camera roll was no exception, and two-thirds of the way through 2015, it became “infused with a new vitality.” Peggy had arrived. When the time then comes for her to leave, Warzel descriptions of his grief are powerful. To remember Peggy, he tries Photo Shuffle on his phone, a feature that automatically changes the wallpaper to different photos from the camera roll. Setting a parameter to “Pets,” Peggy became his wallpaper star. Photo Shuffle is undiscerning—it may choose an Instagram-worthy shot but is just as likely to pull from the reams of outtakes, offering “chaotic, blurred streaks of fur and tongues.” The dynamic shots. The real ones. As Warzel explains, “Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle.” Every day he remembers a different trip with Peggy, or just an “ordinary Wednesday.” In this way, his phone, instead of a constant distraction, becomes a source of reflection and a teacher in grieving. Reading this lovely little essay, I realized that sometimes the dog dies—and that is OK. —CW

4. Flight Risk

Emily Stoddard | The Kenyon Review | January 8, 2024 | 5,463 words

As a child, Emily Stoddard was called gifted, the “most invisible curse you can a put on a child who already feels she does not belong.” For The Kenyon Review, Stoddard reflects on what it was like to navigate life before an ADHD diagnosis in her mid-30s, and how challenging it can be to have conversations, to work, to walk down the street in her shoes. In some of my favorite parts of this piece, her artful and intentional prose mimics the constant chatter of a feverish mind; she also uses third-person perspective to detach from her own self, stepping outside of her body in times when she’s felt it’s all been too much. This is a deeply personal piece about being (and not knowing) you’re neurodivergent—the need to always mask, the feeling that it’s all in your head, the “at-times maddening, at-times inspired” way your interior motor never stops. —CLR

5. A Knife Forged in Fire

Laurence Gonzales | Chicago Magazine | January 9, 2024 | 6,814 words

“What makes a good knife?” In trying to answer what appears to be a simple question, former chef Sam Goldbroch was “swallowed up into the mysteries of metal and fire and force” in becoming a bladesmith in Skokie, Illinois. In this gorgeous profile for Chicago Magazine, writer Laurence Gonzales commissions a knife from Goldbroch and invites us to shadow the master at work. Gonzales does what few writers can; he uses keen observation to recast an industrial space into a place of magical transformations. Read this piece and see the tangerine flame. Hear the forge roar, feel its heat, and revel in the alchemy of your tiny 6,000-word bladesmith apprenticeship. “A cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling, and a searing sound filled the room like a basket of snakes. ‘This is the moment of truth,’ Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. ‘This is when it becomes a knife.’” You’ll enjoy the science and history rendered in detailed scene work, but the most beautiful thing about this story is that it celebrates and exemplifies dedicated craft—in forging handmade knives and in revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. —KS

Audience Award

Here’s the piece our readers dug the most this week:

‘Badass Detective’: How One California Officer Solved Eight Cold Cases—in His Spare Time

Scott Ostler | San Francisco Chronicle | December 27, 2023 | 3,611 words

Given its subject matter on unsolved murders, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call this a “feel-good” story. But Scott Ostler’s profile on Matt Hutchinson, a curious and determined Bay Area detective with a knack for solving decades-long cold cases in his free time, is a great read. In the seven years Hutchinson has been part of the robbery-homicide unit at the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety, he has solved eight cold cases—six homicides and two sexual assaults. Thinking out of the box, and also using today’s DNA testing and crime-solving tools, “[h]e has solved more cold cases in three years than any single detective in the last 15,” and in the process has helped to bring peace and closure to some of the victims’ surviving family members. Not bad for someone off the clock.  —CLR

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The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

You might think the headline promises science and agriculture coming together to help reform the way we raise and process chickens. It doesn’t. Instead, Boyce Upholt tells of the 20th-century quest that changed our food system irrevocably—and how the consequences of that “progress” continue to ripple across the world. An accomplished blend of history and present-day reporting.

Is it possible to build a system of animal agriculture that deepens rather than distances our relationship with animals? One potential ideal might be a future where anyone who chooses to eat meat keeps a handful of chickens clucking through their backyards. When I raised this possibility with one epidemiologist, though, she cautioned that an expansion of such “small-holder” poultry farms could be its own pandemic risk: Now that influenza is endemic in wild birds, a more dispersed poultry production system means more potential sites for spillover.

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Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2024

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Before longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj works on his writing projects, he seeks inspiration by reading and sharing short stories that are freely available on the web. In 2023, he posted 256 stories to X, tagged with #Longreads, from “The Big Quit“by David Means at Harper’s Magazine to “Bitch Baby” by Helle Hill at Oxford American. Of that 256, here are the 10 he loved most.

“Make it Black” by Andre Dubus III (Narrative Magazine)

Andre Dubus III’s immersive novella is about a couple that lives separately in the densely forested acreage they co-own.

Through the screened windows of her bedroom she can hear them, hundreds, maybe thousands of them munching on the leaves of her oaks and maples and other trees she cannot name, even though she has lived in these woods for over twenty years. It’s after midnight, and beside her in the darkness Michael sleeps, his big hairless chest rising and falling. When they made love earlier, his smooth back had felt like rubber to her and she imagined that he was not real, that this man she’s been seeing for over a year now is just some device she bought to ease her loneliness, to ground her away from the nagging sense that she’s hanging as still in the air as a nightgown on a branch.

Some nights she asks him to go sleep at his own place, and she wished she’d asked him that tonight too. If only so can be alone as she listens to the gypsy caterpillars decimate her trees. Their tiny waste rains down through the branches, and she does not know why she wants to listen to this, but she does.

It is late May and the air coming through the screens is cool. She can smell her magnolias and cherry blossoms but also the broken green of leaves that had only just begun their season, and now a hot anger opens up in her at these tiny fuckers that her husband Kai had warned her were coming again. It had been almost nine years since the last generation of them, and Kai had missed the signs then but not this time.

“I Won’t Let You Go” by Hiromi Kawakami (Granta)(Translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell)

Hiromi Kawakami has won several Japanese literary prizes and is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary authors. This story’s plot reveals her fascinating imagination.

I came by something strange while I was travelling. This was what Enomoto had said to me about two months ago.

Enomoto is a painter-slash-high school teacher who lives in the apartment directly above mine. We met when we both served on the local residents’ association, and have been friendly ever since. He would call me on the phone every so often and say, I’m brewing some nice coffee. I would traipse up the stairs to Enomoto’s apartment to enjoy his delicious coffee. We would make small talk and then I would trudge back down the stairs and return to my own apartment. That was the extent of our relationship.

Enomoto’s apartment is exactly the same layout as mine, but it has quite a different feel. It’s tidy, for a bachelor’s flat, but what with his painting supplies and his hobby cameras and his magazines on those subjects, there were things all over the place. Interestingly, though, his apartment gave the overall impression of being much more clearly delineated than mine.

Enomoto only ever referred to the coffee that he brewed as ‘nice’. He would grind the beans on a hand-operated coffee mill, and use a cloth filter. Then he would gently pour it into warmed coffee mugs. The aroma and the taste were both extremely sophisticated. Which is why, whenever Enomoto called me for coffee, I would abandon whatever I was doing and traipse up the stairs to his place.

Lately, though, there haven’t been any invitations from Enomoto for ‘nice coffee’. Ever since the call, two months ago, when he mentioned that he had come by something strange, he hasn’t invited me over.

“That Particular Sunday” by Jamel Brinkley (Guernica)

A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley’s first short story collection, was a finalist for a National Book Award. His 2023 collection, Witness—in which this story appears—has received strong reviews.

There are times when a family has an aura of completion. Remembering such a time feels like gazing at a masterpiece in an art gallery. You might find yourself taking one or two steps backward to absorb the harmonious perfection of the entire image. Or you may be lured by it, drawn to it, inching closer to study every fine detail of composition, the faultless poise with which each element confirms the necessary presence of the others. Take the figure of the son, who hurtles into the foreground of the picture, claiming his position in a web of femaleness, affixing himself to the very center of its adhesive heart, because he belongs there, or so he believes with the wild unblemished certainty of a boy’s imagination. Like everything else in the image, he never changes. Yes, that is my mother, his presence announces. And those are my aunts, he seems to say. And this—of the girl closest to him, her expression as breathless as his own—this is my cousin. My companion. My closest friend. Her soul is the identical twin of mine. The absence of the father doesn’t matter one bit. The absence of the siblings doesn’t matter much either, even though the son will love them hopelessly. Recklessly. They belong to a different elsewhere, a time yet to come, with another father to come, and the circumstances of their lives will frenzy the family, purpling it, cloying it until it is spoiled. Then it will be no different from any ordinary clan. Unpleasant to regard. An eyesore.

“Splashdown” by Jonathan Escoffery (Oprah Daily)

Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You—short-listed for the Booker Prize and long-listed for a National Book Award—is a collection of interlinked short stories following a Jamaican family living in Miami.

The summer he turned thirteen, Cukie Panton set out for the Florida Keys to meet his father for the first time. By then, Ox meant little more to Cukie than a syllable spat from his mother’s lips. What he knew of Ox was that he was American— the catalyst for Cukie having been born in Baptist Hospital, right on Kendall Drive—and that Ox had stuck out the first two months of fatherhood, then bounced, leaving to Cukie the dried ink on his birth record that spelled out Lennox Martin.

More than a dozen years after this abrupt departure, Cukie’s mom answered the phone to hear a remorseful Ox, saying he should know his boy. By this time Cukie felt ambivalent. It didn’t help that Daphne Panton figured that the drink or else some brush with death must have resuscitated Ox’s conscience to bring him calling. Perhaps Andrew had inspired Ox’s reemergence, the hurricane having wiped away so much that would have to be rebuilt, not even a year ago. Whatever the affliction, Cukie’s mother assumed it was ephemeral. The calls continued, though, and when plans grew specific, she told Cukie to pack his duffel and they departed Kendall for Smuggler’s Key.

“The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion” by Kelly Luce (Colorado Review)

A new short story by the author of the novel Pull Me Under and the collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail.

After Carl left me for a woman he met buying manure off Craigslist, I put in for an out-of-state letter carrier transfer with the postal service. I wanted a fresh start, a chance to discover something. It didn’t matter what. I wanted to learn something I never would have learned in Jacksonville while married to Carl. To feel like the person I’d once been, a person I’d liked being. The first trade that came up was in Happy, Texas, a town of 603 souls outside of Amarillo. The carrier there was eager to move to Florida to be near his twin grandsons. My new route consisted mostly of cluster boxes I could drive right up to.

Happy’s motto was “the town without a frown.” I set up a bank account at Happy Bank, got my Texas driver’s license at Happy City Hall, and waited for a line of pickup trucks to follow a hearse into Happy Cemetery. I found an apartment on Happy’s main street, Main Street, above an event hall called Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion. The apartment had two bedrooms—plenty of space for my equipment. The stove didn’t work and there were no closets, but the ceilings were high and there was a filthy skylight in the kitchen that Randall, the property manager, told me was put in after a meteorite came through the roof in 1999. The meteorite sold me on the place.

“The Pink House at the End of the Street on the Other Side of the Town” by Manuel Muñoz (Virginia Quarterly Review)

Manuel Muñoz is the author of the story collections Zigzagger, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, The Consequences, as well as the novel What You See in the Dark. He received a 2023 MacArthur fellowship for “depicting with empathy and nuance the Mexican-American community of California’s central valley.”   

Silvio, whom everyone called El Sapo, had been coming the longest, but only during the wet times when the fields ran muddy and no one else would brave the kind of cold that would lock your knuckles, no matter how thick the gloves. By spring, he’d return to a pueblito called Pozos, which made everyone ask why he’d go back to a hole in the ground. A frog crawling under the mud to wait out the heat. That was El Sapo, leaving sometime in early April before the heat came. And then the others would arrive. Fidelio and his twin brother, Modesto, who for some reason was several inches shorter than him. Jerónimo, quiet and stark, who claimed to know Silvio, but nobody knew for sure. Baldomero El Mero Mero, who boasted that he was the one who had shown the others how to start with a bus in Celaya, take it to the outskirts of Tijuana, and, right over there, at a llantería owned by his old friend Raimundo, you could sneak through the dust yard of Raimundo’s old tires and cross to the other side, get to the highway on foot, and, if you were smart enough to hide your money, catch a Greyhound to a place called Goshen, where you’d go to the phone booth outside of the station, look out at the cotton fields as you dialed a number and told a man named Poldo that you’d made it across. A cousin by way of another cousin. A friend of the family. From Celaya. From Ojo de Agua. From La Cuevita. From Charco Blanco. Yes, yes, of course. A third yes if you promised you had the money to pay a little rent for a month. That’s how Eliseo showed up. And poor Casimiro, who wore thick glasses and peered into the fruit trees with his whole face to see what he was picking. But you’d have to know Spanish to know why all the other men laughed at his name.

“Love Machine” by Nic Anstett (Passages North)

In a doomed world in which robots are taking over, a lonely man explores his sexuality.

The robots have taken Seattle and I am on the apps again. I can no longer sleep in my half empty queen bed without another body. More than India, I miss her dog, Binky, who diagonally draped himself across the mattress every night. Whether it was a soggy July evening or one of Baltimore’s cruelly dry winter nights, I could count on a furry dog blanket. Now, my nighttime hands grab only limp fabric and empty air. I miss the warmth and I miss having something living to pull towards me, which in the last several months had always been Binky. Even before she left, I could tell India was pulling away. So, now I’m spending my nights during the machine uprising swiping through the singles of the greater Chesapeake Bay area.

I’m not alone in this at least. It turns out that the oncoming annihilation of organic life makes loneliness even more lonely.

“You picked the right time to start messing around,” Krista told me over bloody marys two weeks back. “Even the straightest of straight guys are sleeping with transsexuals now. There’s no room for pickiness.”

“Is it Too Late?” By Pegah Ouji (Isele Magazine)

An Iranian immigrant remembers a retirement community resident she cared for during her early years in in the United States.

The first time I met you, I thought you looked like a dried peach, sweet but aged. Please forgive my crude description. I’d just turned seventeen and oddly enough, a young girl’s imagination sometimes defies delicacy. I close my eyes and imagine you now after all these years. It has become an old game. How much of you can I still remember? Your hands, wrinkled, slender fingers with soft tips which had typed up many articles on your old typewriter and hardly ever had held anything heavier than a ball-point pen. Your honey-colored eyes, marble-like, in the folds of your wrinkled eyelids. By the time I met you, you had barely any hair left, the remaining survivors white and fuzzy. You see now why the peach was an apt metaphor?

We met during my first week at Hillside Retirement Community, a place you had already been calling home at that point for more than five years. Being so young and naive and having immigrated from Iran with my mother and grandmother only a year before that, I felt alive to have a job of my own. Life in America was finally beginning to pay off, I’d thought. Despite my shaky grasp of the English language, Mrs. Hazelwood had hired me for four hours every day after school as a dining room server. The trick to getting hired had been to appear like I understood more than I actually did, achieved chiefly this through vigorous head nods and readily dispensed yes replies.

“Different” by Sindya Bhanoo (The Masters Review)

Sindya Bhanoo is the author of the story collection, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere. “Different” appears in this collection.

For three decades, Chand gave his Indian graduate students his house keys when he and Raji left town. He told them to relax and use his spacious home as a place to rest and study, to use the hot tub in the back, and the grill, as long as they did not put beef on it. “Sleep in the guest bedroom,” he said. “Escape your dreary apartments.” It gave him pleasure to offer comforts that graduate student stipends could not afford. In his home, students could watch satellite channels like Zee TV and TV Asia and catch up on episodes of Koffee with Karan and Kaun Banega Crorepati. Before Skype and WhatsApp and FaceTime, some students made long distance phone calls from his landline. Chand never charged them for it. He treated them like family, because their own families were so far away.

He had been a graduate student once, in a small town in Montana, tens of thousands of miles away from Vellore, his hometown in South India. Things were different then. When he moved to America, he called his parents once every three months, and was careful to think through what to say before dialing. Back then, calls cost three dollars for the first minute and one dollar for every minute thereafter. He remembered the loneliness, the immense sorrow that came from going months without uttering a word of Tamil. There was no way for him to express certain thoughts, certain feelings, in the English language. He remembered the warmth he felt when the one Indian professor on campus, a Punjabi chemical engineer named Dr. Gupta, occasionally invited him to his home for dinner.

“Wednesday’s Child” by Yiyun Li (The New Yorker)

For Pravesh, this story was love at first read.

The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself, which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness; absolute stillness is death; and when you’re dead you no longer wait for anything. No, not death, Rosalie clarified, but stillness, like hibernation or estivation, waiting for . . . Before she could embellish the thought with some garden-variety clichés, the monitor nearby rolled out a schedule change: the 11:35 train to Brussels Midi was cancelled.

All morning, Rosalie had been migrating between platforms in Amsterdam Centraal, from Track 4 to Track 10 then to Track 7 to Track 11 and back to 4. The trains to Brussels, both express and local, had been cancelled one after another. A family—tourists, judging by their appearance, as Rosalie herself was—materialized at every platform along with Rosalie, but now, finally, gave up and left, pulling their suitcases behind them. A group of young people, with tall, overfilled backpacks propped beside them like self-important sidekicks, gathered in front of a monitor, planning their next move. Rosalie tried to catch a word or two—German? Dutch? It was 2021, and there were not as many English-speaking tourists in Amsterdam that June as there had been on Rosalie’s previous visit, twenty years before.

She wondered what to do next. Moving from track to track would not deliver her to the hotel in Brussels. Would cancelled trains only lead to more cancelled trains, or would this strandedness, like ceaseless rain during a rainy season or a seemingly unfinishable novel, suddenly come to an end, on a Sunday afternoon in late May or on a snowy morning in January? Years ago, an older writer Rosalie had befriended inquired in a letter about the book she was working on: “How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.”

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Check out all of Pravesh’s previous story recommendations:  2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

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Pravesh Bhardwaj wrote and directed “Baby Doll,” an Audible Original podcast in Hindi (featuring Richa Chadha and Jaideep Ahlawat).

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A Second Life for My Beloved Dog

A short, but beautiful essay on how an iPhone feature helped Charlie Warzel to grieve for his dog, Peggy. An insightful reflection on grief and a heartwarming affirmation of the power of happy memories.

On the day she died, I set my phone’s wallpaper to my favorite photo of Peggy—appearing to smile on a ridgeline trail in Missoula, Montana, the bright-yellow balsamroot flowers in bloom behind her. But a month later, I told myself that it was time to stop wallowing. Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.

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A Knife Forged in Fire

Deep care and craft are on display in this keenly observed profile of bladesmith Sam Goldbroch for Chicago Magazine. Dive into blade science and history along with the sensory experiences of Golbroch’s forge, as he creates a knife commissioned by the author, Laurence Gonzales.

Sam brought out what looked like a deck of tarot cards with nothing on them. No Hermit. No Hanged Man. No Fool. They were gray, thicker than ordinary cards, and clearly heavy in his hands. Inside of them a message waited. He had a long ritual to perform to release it.

As he shuffled the cards, they clattered together, revealing the first hint of their message: They were made of steel. He stacked them and squared up the edges so that all of the cards were nice and straight, nothing sticking out or crooked. Everything neat. The alchemical precision favored by Newton in his dim laboratories.

He clamped them in an industrial vise. Now the cards made a block about the size of a thick paperback book. They would never be individual cards again, these 12 pounds of two different kinds of steel, arranged in alternating layers.

And I knew that Sam would make his own Damascus steel for this knife. The blade and handle would mate to make a work of art that was an exceptional tool.

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Flight Risk

Related read: In a 2022 essay at Harper’s Bazaar, Carla Ciccone describes what it’s like to be diagnosed with ADHD at nearly 40.

What is it like to navigate each day with ADHD? In this personal essay for The Kenyon Review, Emily Stoddard—a writer who was diagnosed in her 30s—describes life with a restless mind and an interior motor that never quits. Stoddard artfully writes about being neurodivergent, and what it has meant to mask all of her life.

In the wake of diagnosis, I’m forced to admit the creature I named Restlessness both is and is not who I thought she was. The alphabet soup begins to expand and stratify with the language of neurodivergence — a map that only now, in retrospect, can I see and draw meaning from. Some regions of the language make me flinch at their candor and their implied judgment: thoughtless mistakes, oppositional defiance, rejection sensitive dysphoria. And other regions, especially the phenomenon of masking, shimmer with their potential for nuance. Here is a place where I can build a home for complexity. Masking rearranges every interaction I’ve ever had into an open question.

Useful is another mask. It’s the one I have worn the longest. It’s the mask many try on after gifted, after emotional, after too much. If I can’t make you understand me, maybe I can make you need me. If I don’t want to play dead forever, perhaps I can live to be of service — it’s easier to pretend to be noble than to go on being misunderstood. If I can’t belong with you, maybe I can do something for you instead.

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The Neighbors Who Destroyed Their Lives

On Christmas Eve, 1991, a woman named Dana Ireland was raped and murdered on the Big Island of Hawaii. Two brothers were wrongfully convicted of the crime and exonerated 25 years later. Now they live among people who once maligned them, and some who actively participated in the injustice perpetrated against them:

Wrongful convictions can result from any number of cascading errors, blatant oversights, and outright slipups—some conscious and deliberate, some structural and circumstantial. Over 32 years, the investigation and prosecutions of the Schweitzers seem to have incorporated every possible one of them. There was intense media attention putting pressure on police to make an arrest—the “dead white girl” phenomenon. There was cultural bias against Native Hawaiians like the Schweitzers—the legacy, well known to Hawaiians, of lynchings of native men for alleged attacks on white women. There was investigative tunnel vision—going after the Schweitzer brothers even after the facts failed to support that case. There was blind faith in jailhouse informants—a slew of them, all hoping for special favors from prosecutors in return for their testimony. There was junk science—about teeth marks, and tire treads. There even may have been prosecutorial misconduct—a state lawyer misleading a judge about the outcome of one of the brothers’ polygraph tests.

Now that Ian has been exonerated, he needs to reacclimate to life in the world. He had to get a driver’s license and learn how to use a smartphone. He needs to get comfortable around people again. These towns were small enough already. For decades the Schweitzers were the area’s greatest villains; now they run into people and those people are nice. At the market and at restaurants, they congratulate Ian and ask if they can give him a hug. It’s weird. He can’t help but think: Where were those people for the past 30 years? But he knows there are others out there too—people who benefited from accusing him of a crime they knew he hadn’t committed. Chief among them is John Gonsalves.

As our conversation meandered over a sunny afternoon, Ian allowed himself to wonder about Gonsalves. What must it be like for him now, to know that the lie didn’t hold? If the brothers ever did confront him, what would he say?

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