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Sifting through the aftermath of a disastrous blaze. The romance that launched a thousand Supreme Court opinions. A poetic ode to a simple life, well lived. Tracing the arc of food writing. And examining the hidden costs of a particularly sensitive surgical procedure. Our favorites of the week, pulled from all of ourย editorsโ picks.
Megan Greenwell | Wired | June 27, 2023 | 7,987 words
Megan Greenwellโs piece does what the best longform features do: It mesmerizes you with an opening so powerful and a story so compelling that you deliberately read it slowly, just to make it last. This pieceโabout a devastating fire at a branch of the National Archives and Records Administration that happened to contain records belonging to Greenwellโs grandfatherโis nearly 8,000 words long, but the prose is so sharp and cinematic that youโll wish it was longer. โThe National Personnel Records Center fire burned out of control for two days before firefighters were able to begin putting it out,โ she writes. โPhotos show the roof ablaze, a nearly 5-acre field of flame. The steel beams that had once held up the glass walls jut at unnatural angles, like so many broken legs.โ Even were it not set against a backdrop of the U.S. government, this would be a fascinating mystery: What or who started the fire and how do workers attempt to uncover precious facts from seriously damaged files? Did Greenwellโs grandfatherโs records survive the blaze? Be sure to take it slow and let this story smolder. Iโm certainly glad I did. โKS
Kerry Howley | New York | June 21, 2023 | 7,555 words
My husband sent me this story while I was reporting in Idaho last week, with a message that said, โIsnโt this by that writer you like?โ The answer, reader, isย yes.ย Kerry Howleyโs 2022 story about anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser was rightly named a finalist for a National Magazine Awardโone of several nominations Howleyโs work has received in the last several yearsโand I suspect this piece about Clarence and Ginni Thomas will be in the running for many, many honors. Whereas with Dannenfelser, Howley was shedding light on a powerful person who isnโt a household name, here she tackles two of the better-known political (yes, SCOTUS justices areย political) figures in America. She does it without access to them, instead surveying pre-existing material on the Thomases with remarkable facility, mustering everything she needs, and nothing she doesnโt, to tell the story of their marriage. Take the seemingly mundane detail of Ginni telling a bunch of right-wing youth that her favorite charm on a bracelet Clarence gave her is a pixie because, to her husband, she is โkind of a pixieโฆkind of a troublemaker,โ which Howley convincingly positions as a metaphor for the havoc Ginni has wreaked on American democracy. Consider this brilliantly constructed sentence: โThey take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift.โย And thatโs just in the first section! This piece is one for the ages in both substance and style. I mean,ย damn. โSD
Jeremy B. Jones | The Bitter Southerner | June 6, 2023 | 1,580 words
I have never before picked an obituary for our Top 5, but Jeremy B. Jonesโ ode to his grandfather deserves recognition. At just over 1500 words, itโs not a particularly long piece, but itโs a particularly poetic one, and is enough to get to knowโand respectโJonesโ Papaw. Ray Harrell lived a simple life on a little bit of land in Fruitland, North Carolina. To many, it would not be enough; for Harrell, it was plenty. After all, as Jones writes, he had โa reliable tractor and a fiery woman.โ It was a good life because he appreciated what he had, was contented with his lot. Jones notes that these quiet lives often slip past unnoticed, โyet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. Theyโre the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.โ A small essay about a simple life that I found hugely moving. โCW
Marian Bull | n+1 | June 15, 2023 | 3,978 words
In reviewing Rebecca May Johnsonโsย Small Fires, Marian Bull looks at how infusing recipes with introspection and experience begat the cooking memoir. What I loved about about this pieceโbesides spurring me to pick upย Small Fires, which also appeared in our recent feature โMeals for Oneโโis that while Bull surveys chef memoirs, she hails Johnsonโs book as one for the home cook, the self-trained enthusiast. โJohnson has inverted this form by writing a memoir of a recipe, rather than a โmemoirโ with recipes,โ she writes. Johnson looks at cooking as translation and recipes as a form of performance, which is comforting for someone like me who views a recipe as a guide: โThe unpredictable โI that cooks,โ who resists the recipe again and again, generates new translations.โ How inspiring and affirming to be invited to take a seat at this generous table where nothing is lost and everything is gained in translation. โKS
Ava Kofmanย |ย ProPublicaย andย The New Yorkerย |ย June 26, 2023ย |ย 8,601 words
Itโs easy to think that โmen trying to upgrade their dongsโ is a journalism cheat code of sorts. Havingย written about them myselfย many years ago, I can assure you that itโs not. Pitfalls abound. Tone is everything. Jokes are easy; reserve is hard. (So is avoiding double entendres.) Yet, Ava Kofman manages to thread every needle in her stunning examination of the state of penile-enlargement procedures, which focuses primarily on issues surrounding the popular Penuma implant. She writes compassionately about the patients, not dismissing the complex psychological situations that led them to pursue surgery. She writes unblinkingly about the doctor who popularized the procedure, and whose practice seems at times to operate with all the care of a 30-minute oil change jointโand about the surgeon who โwas doing such brisk business repairing Penuma complications that heโd relocated his practice from Philadelphia to an office down the street.โ And speaking of unblinking, I dare you not to wince as she plays fly on the wall during an implantation; you may never hear the phrase โinside outโ the same way again. This story may have drawn you in with its imagined salaciousness, but it delivers something far better: truth. โPR
What piece did our readers love most this week? One that makes clear that the kids are not all right.
Joseph Cox | Vice | June 20, 2023 | 2,111 words
Those looking for dirty deeds to be done seem to be going no further than the Comm, a series of Discord communities in which people order violence, including commissioning robberies for bitcoin, and organizing swats against vulnerable people for perceived slights and insults. Forย Vice, Joseph Cox infiltrated this vile, testosterone-fueled world of crime. โKS
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, argues that the Justice Department has victimized and attempted to silence conservative parents.
In the final six months of the Trump presidency, the federal government executed 13 people. In January 2021, the same month he incited an insurrection at the Capitol, Trump oversaw three executions in just four days. Thereโs really no other way to put it: Trump was eager for the state to kill people on his watch. Two Rolling Stone reporters detail the unprecedented stretch of executions:
It was Sessionsโ successor, Barr, who took the concrete step in July 2019 of ordering the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume executions.ย
Barr wrote proudly of the decision in his bookย One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, published about a year after the Trump presidency ended, devoting a whole chapter โ โBringing Justice to Violent Predatorsโ โ to the blitz of federal executions. Not a shocking move from a man who, while George H.W. Bushโs attorney general in the early 1990s, praised the death penalty in a series of official recommendations, claiming that it works as a deterrent, โpermanently incapacitate[s] extremely violent offenders,โ and โserves the important societal goal of just retribution.โ (Without a hint of irony, he added, โIt reaffirms societyโs moral outrage at the wanton destruction of innocent human life.โ)
Trump, of course, was not so keen to engage with the subject intellectually.ย The sum total of his discussions of the death penalty with his top law-enforcement officer, Barr says, was a single, offhand conversation. After an unrelated White House meeting, Barr was preparing to leave the Oval Office when, he says, he gave Trump a โheads-upโ that โwe would be resuming the death penalty.โ Trump โ apparently unaware of his own AGโs longstanding philosophy on capital punishment โ asked Barr if he personally supported the death penalty and why.
Trumpโs lack of interest in the details had grave repercussions for the people whose fates were in his hands. According to multiple sources inside the administration, Trump completely disregarded the advice of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an administrative body designed to administer impartial pleas for clemency in death-penalty cases and other, lower-level offenses. And Barr says he does not recall discussing any of the 13 inmates who were eventually killed with the president who sent them to the death chamber.ย
That means Trump never talked with Barr about Lisa Montgomery, a deeply mentally ill and traumatized person who became theย first woman executed by the federal government since 1953. Or Wesley Ira Purkey, whose execution was delayed a day by a judge who ruled that his advancing Alzheimerโs disease had left Purkey unaware of why he was being executed. (The Supreme Court reversed that ruling the next day.) Or Daniel Lewis Lee, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Charles Mitchell, Keith Dwayne Nelson, William Emmett LeCroy Jr., Christopher Andre Vialva, Orlando Cordia Hall, Alfred Bourgeois, Corey Johnson, and Dustin John Higgs.
And it means Trump never spoke with Barr about Brandon Bernard.