The hard truths of war, child trafficking in India, a deeply personal search for a lost climber, the high personal toll veterinarians must pay in offering the final kindness to old and sick pets, and a call to look beyond common ethnic food tropes.
Important trigger warning: Please note that stories three and four reference suicide. Both pieces are difficult, but we hope that youโll agree that theyโre important reads.
Joshua Yaffa | The New Yorker | January 30, 2023 | 9,078 words
โAbout all anyone can trust in war is that everybody lies.โ As I read Joshua Yaffaโs piece about accusations of betrayal among residents of a Ukrainian city liberated from Russian occupation, I kept thinking about this sentence. It comes not from Yaffaโs piece, butย from a storyย about the treatment of ISIS fighters after Iraqi forces retook the city of Mosul, which I had the honor of editing six years ago. So often in conflict coverage, the media are quick to draw blunt distinctions: Ukraine good, Russia evil; military righteous, ISIS monstrous. Itโs easier, I suppose, than acknowledging that war is a hideous enterprise from which virtually nothing and no one will emerge clean. In the aftermath of violence, it can be hard to discern the truth from what people wish it to be, and administering justice, while an essential moral endeavor, is also a deeply fraught one. In his haunting feature, Yaffa doesnโt seek to untangle facts so much as he listens to the stories people are telling. They are talking to him, of course, but you get the sense that they are telling stories to themselves as well: They are remembering, processing, contextualizing, rationalizing, and in some cases rewriting. What do these stories and their contradictions reveal? The picture is messy, which is to say, itโs true. โSD
Ritwika Mitra | Fifty Two | February 3, 2023 | 4,900 words
Muddles of light and noise overlay my memories of India; it is a place that envelops you in a blanket of color, energy, and smells, with life and dirt pulsating from every inch. It is also a complicated country, so I am fascinated by this publication,ย Fifty Two, which publishes weekly essays on aspects of Indian history, politics, and culture. This week I read a powerful piece by Ritwika Mitra, reporting on child trafficking in the Sundarbans, an area plagued by natural disasters and poverty. Mitra focuses on the story of one mother, Ayesha, and the child she has after her family sold her to โOi Bihariโ (the old man). Her case is not unique, and Mitra first meets Ayesha while interviewing other women at Goranbose Gram Bikash Kendra (GGBK), a community-led organization working on gender-based violence. Mitra narrows in on Ayesha, talking to her and her daughter over several months. This time allows her to dig deep, and she does not sugarcoat their tempestuous relationship and strong characters, an honesty that lets the reader into the lives of this family and the pain of their past.ย โCW
Jason Nark | Alpinist | January 30, 2023 | 6,174 words
โI had no special power, they said, to keep him alive.โ Sometimes a piece on grief will kick you square in the gut, whisking you back, back to that place where you are indeed powerless. In this moving essay atย Alpinist, Jason Nark comes to terms with the suicide of a dear friend as he investigates the disappearance of Matthew Greene, a climber who went missing in California in 2013. โGrief counselors said I couldnโt have done anything to save Anthony. Even now, nine years after his death, some part of me thinks theyโre wrong. We hugged when we parted that afternoon, making plans to meet up, and he held that embrace a second longer than usual. I still feel him, pressing on me, like a mountain.โ โKS
Andrew Bullis | Slate | February 5, 2023 | 3,220 words
Unless you have a long-lived bird, youโre generally going to outlive your pet and be faced with that final visit to the vet. If youโve had to euthanize a very sick or very old pet, you know that sharp, stabbing pain of loss that lessens only a tiny bit each day. But, have you ever stopped to think about the toll that euthanizing animals takes on the vets who provide this necessary kindness? Atย Slate, veterinarian Andrew Bullis helps us understand the ongoing personal cost thatโs so high it can drive some vets to suicide. โYou see, our business is healing, yes. But you all know thereโs only so much we can do. In the end, euthanasia is an option. I want to make this abundantly clear: If thereโs one thing you must do flawlessly in your career, itโs killing.โ โKS
Angie Kang | Catapult | February 8, 2023 | 2,146 words
Food is an essential part of culture, and an accessible way into understanding it. (Exhibits A and B: See the Pixar animated short filmย Bao, or nearly any account of an Asian American childโs embarrassing โlunchbox momentโ at school.) But Angie Kang urges storytellers to create more varied and nuanced stories about Chinese culture and the wider Asian American experience โ likeย Fresh Off the Boatย andย Everything Everywhere All At Onceย โ that reach beyond food. โWe donโt stop living in between meals,โ she writes. Kangโs resonant words and fantastic artwork combine in a delightful illustrated essay about narrative and representation. โIโm just hungry for something new,โ she writes. I am as well, and with this fresh, inspired piece, she delivers. โCLR
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Is finding closure via grueling through-hike a new idea? Not even a little bit. But that doesnโt mean that Gunnar Lundbergโs account of remembrance and renewal isnโt a compelling read. It might just make you want to grab a map and some moleskin.
For me, to โfinishโ grieving meant making a choice. So many of my choices since his death were rooted in penance and shame: guilt for planning our hiking trip to Isle Royale, for swimming in Temperance River, for not jumping back in. Finishing grieving meant finally choosing to forgive myself and to celebrate, rather than mourn, his life. Those 144 days taught me to carry only the things I needed most and to leave behind what weighed me down.
As January draws to a close, our favorite stories this week included a stirring critical essay, a paean to the worldโs greatest boxed meal, a rethinking of psychedelicsโ impact on the planet, a profile of a craftsperson at his peak, and an eye-opener about how humpback whales use air in some unexpected ways.
Ken Chenย |ย n+1ย |ย 11,542 wordsย |ย January 25, 2023
After Corky Lee passed last year, the photographer and community organizer was memorialized in his hometownโs most conventionally prestigious outlets: Theย Timesย offered a sizable obituary, as didย Hua Hsu inย The New Yorker. This week, on the first anniversary of Leeโs death, Ken Chen rendered an altogether different kind of portrait inย n+1. Much of the same biographical information is included, as are a number of Leeโs iconic photographs of Asian Americans in New York throughout the last six decades. Yet, when Chen writes about his encounters with Lee, and about the 14 photographs he selects to represent Leeโs work, the grief that suffuses his words isnโt solely about Lee, but about the many atrocities visited upon the Asian American community, up to and after Leeโs death. Chenโs critical acumen here is reason enough to read: โHis images lack a charismatic subject,โ he writes of Lee. โThose whom capital dismissed as surplus, he saw as beautiful. He commemorated the multitude, the striking waiters and seamstresses whose unruly abundance crowded away any beatific composition.โ But he brings a similar understated poetry to the social conditions Leeโs work served to illuminate โ and with violence against Asian American elders and others seemingly unending (including a horrifyingย recent attackย in my own hometown), that juxtaposition makes Chenโs piece nearly as indelible as the images it contains. โPR
Ivana Rihter | Catapult | January 19, 2023 | 2,261 words
I only discovered Kraft dinners later in life after moving to North America revealed the cult of Kraft to me. A stable lurking in every cupboard; I admired the respect that something so impossibly orange had managed to garner. When Ivana Rihter finds KDs, though, they are much more; cooked for her by her baba, they are inextricably linked to her immigration story. She describes the process of boiling the pasta and adding the sauce with reverence, the memory mixed in with her love for her baba and appreciation for the economic hardships her family struggled through to start their new life. Her baba teaches her to put feta on top, and with this โsecret little piece of the home country mixed in with all-American shelf-stable cheeseโ it remains a food for life, and โ consistently sitting at about a dollar a box โ one that carries on seeing her through hard times. I found this an unexpectedly beautiful essay, more about memory and belonging than cheesy pasta. Food can transport you back in time, especially if, as Rihter describes it, it โis soaked with memories of [an] origin story.โ โCW
Amber X. Chen | Atmos | January 16, 2023 | 3,196 words
In this piece, Chen explores what the current psychedelic renaissance means for environmental activism, and how synthetic drugs like LSD and MDMA and psychoactive plants like ayahuasca and peyote can stir change within individuals โ and ultimately galvanize social movements. This all sounds incredibly positive on the surface, but not everyone who dabbles in such mind-altering journeys is transformed for the better; psychedelics also fuel right-wing movements, too. (See: โQAnon Shaman.โ) The decriminalization of psychedelics is a step toward making their therapeutic benefits accessible to more people, yes, but as Chen notes, it increases the threat of deforestation, and โ with todayโs psychedelic movement being largely white โ it also takes power away from Indigenous people, who have harnessed the healing power of these sacred plants for thousands of years. (See also aย Top 5 essayย I picked last year: โThe Gentrification of Consciousness.โ) I appreciate Chenโs exploration here, and the questions posed that I havenโt stopped thinking about, like: โHow broken is Western society that we think we need drugs in order to facilitate mass climate action?โ โCLR
Elly Fishman | Chicago Magazine | January 17, 2023 | 4,177 words
Recently, in his late 60s, my dad decided to learn how to play the violin. I respect the choice to try the impossible, especially something as delicate and timeless as bowing a stringed instrument. (My parentsโ cats, who endure the scratching out of notes from beneath the couch or bed, seem to have a different opinion.) After reading this lovely profile, I think perhaps my dad, a skilled carpenter, should also try apprenticing as a luthier. I, someone with zero skills at playing an instrument besides an egg shaker, who curses putting IKEA furniture together, was mesmerized by the descriptions of how John Becker, perhaps the best violin restorer on earth, practices his craft. Elly Fishmanโs profile has a musical quality: It sweeps readers through chapters of Beckerโs personal story and dwells in long, lyrical moments when, with the surest of hands, Becker repairs some of the most revered instruments on the planet โ namely, Stradivari. There are just 650 of the violins left. What makes them so extraordinary? Musicians and scientists may puzzle over that question forever. In the meantime, Becker works โ quietly, meticulously, instinctively. โWe are caretakers of these instruments,โ one of his clients tells him. โWe move on, but these instruments continue to the next generation.โ โSD
Doug Perrine | Hakai Magazine | December 20, 2022 | 1,500 words
Itโs well known that many animals use tools to aid feeding and other tasks of life. Think: otters floating on their backs, cracking shells with rocks. Youโd think it would be hard for whales to use tools, but as Doug Perrine reports atย Hakai Magazine, humpbacks use whatโs available to them โ air and water โ to form bubbles for a variety of activities. โIโm tempted to describe the air in a humpbackโs lungs as a Swiss army knife because Iโve seen whales do so many different things with it,โ he wrote. โIt is not actually a tool collection though, but a storehouse of raw construction material with which the whale can fashion a variety of tools. Lacking free fingers and opposable thumbs, whales are unable to create and use tools in the same way as humans, but reveal their intelligence through the manner in which they utilize other body parts for tool production and use.โ โKS
Enjoyed these recommendations? Browse all of ourย editorsโ picks, or sign up for our weekly newsletter if you havenโt already:
Kickstart your weekend by getting the weekโs best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
This is a surprisingly poignant essay about growing up with Kraft dinners. Ivana Rihter manages to make a cheap pasta dish sound beautiful, but itโs not about the food, itโs about the memories of family and heritage that it conjures up.
More than twenty years later, the sound of dried pasta tubes sliding across cardboard soothes me like a rain stick. Kraft was the first meal I ever truly loved, the first one I attempted to cook on my own, and the first food I could not live without. There are four boxes tucked into my pantry as I write this.