The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
September 20, 2024 at 03:30PM
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In this week’s Top 5:
- Suffering from environmental illness
- The double-edged sword that is social media
- Uncovering painful family secrets
- Jail library book treasures
- Cooking as a free man
1. The Fever Called Living
Evan Malmgren | Harper’s Magazine | September 12, 2024 | 6,063 words
Choosing between Mulder and Scully has always felt like an unfair binary. Like Mulder, I want to believe; like Scully, I have a hard time actually doing so. Though I love listening to conspiracy and high-strangeness podcasts—hell, being a guest on Coast to Coast AM remains a highlight of my professional life—I’ve also never had much truck with cryptids or chemtrails or the idea that cell phone towers are scrambling our brains. Yet, reading Evan Malmgren’s Harper’s feature about people struggling with environmental illness made me feel like my skepticism may have veered into coldheartedness. There’s no question that the folks Malmgren spends time with are suffering. There’s also no question that the air and our bodies are filled with signals and substances that simply didn’t exist until relatively recently. Who am I to dismiss conditions like electromagnetic hypersensitivity or multiple chemical sensitivity out of hand? What makes this piece so compelling is that Malmgren gives free voice to his own struggle between distrust and acceptance. Like anyone, he has questions about the nature of these conditions, but his curiosity doesn’t mean ridicule. That leads to something truly rare: a compassionate, good-faith investigation into something that’s nearly impossible to quantify. The truth is out there, even if we never find it. —PR
2. The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
Thea Lim | The Walrus | September 17, 2024 | 3,294 words
I would still exist if I deleted my Instagram account. I am worth more than my likes and swipes. I provide value beyond all of my Yelp and Google reviews. These are the types of mantras I repeat to myself after I intentionally put away my phone at home—when I practice being fully present with my daughter after school—and then unintentionally end up feeling like a shell of a person. I frequently return to a number of essays that explore life under an algorithm and the commodification of everything in our day-to-day lives, including these two pieces by Jason Guriel, much of Kyle Chayka’s writing, and even this Longreads essay by Devin Kelly. I plan to file Thea Lim’s piece alongside them. Here, Lim discusses the value of art, work, and the self in a time of constant surveillance, data collection, and digital performance. She writes about the “gamification of artmaking” from her perspective as a novelist, recounting the experience of publishing a book and releasing a piece of art into today’s stats-obsessed world. “How big is the print run? How many stops on the tour? How many reviews on Goodreads? How many mentions on Bookstagram, BookTok? . . . I was glued to my numbers like a day trader,” she writes. “My scale of worth had torn off, like a roof in a hurricane, replaced with an external one.” But even people who don’t make art or who eschew a Very Online Life are still part of this game, whether they like it or not. “If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers,” she writes. So on that note, it’s time for you to get to work: read Lim’s piece about what it means to create and consume art these days. After all, her success depends on all of our clicks. —CLR
3. The Divorce Tapes
Beth Raymer | New York | September 10, 2024 | 6,334 words
As I type, I’m still processing this essay—which is to say, I’m still recovering from how gutting it is to read. As an adult, Beth Raymer came into possession of recordings from phone taps that her father once used to spy on his wife. He hoped to use the tapes as ammunition when he filed for divorce, but on that front, they never amounted to much. Instead, the recordings became fuel for Raymer’s excavation of a horrific incident from childhood: her sister, Colleen, was raped by an older relative at age 13, but when she told her mother, who in turn told her own siblings, no one did a thing. The adults talked about it on the phone in the cruelest, most sexist terms (Colleen drank beer her rapist gave her; maybe she wanted to have sex) and agreed to keep the assault a family secret. When Raymer tells her family what’s on the tapes—or reminds them, if they were the ones having the conversations in the first place—she hopes this proof, the tangible truth, will mean something. But it doesn’t. Her mother refutes much of it. Her aunts shirk responsibility. As for Colleen, she shrugs, because she never needed proof to know what happened to her—she carried it in her memory, in her body. “Proof has its limitations,” Raymer writes. “Proof is, or at least can be, just another fold in the knot.” It’s a knot that many readers, myself included, know well, the one that families tie to justify poor choices, to excuse bad behavior by blood kin, to absolve themselves of causing pain. And perhaps this is the ultimate curse of family, as Raymer discovers: one person may want to untangle the knot, to lay its strands bare, only to discover that there is awful futility in doing it alone. —SD
4. Contraband Marginalia
Kasey Butcher Santana | Split Lip Magazine | September 14, 2024 | 2,004 words
Kasey Butcher Santana’s essay for Split Lip Magazine checks an important box for me as a reader: it’s a peek into a vocation and a world I know nothing about. I would have happily read many more words here, though this piece is deeply satisfying. Santana relates tiny yet fascinating surprises on her path from academia to becoming a jail librarian. “I met a person just out of federal prison with ‘bookworm’ tattooed across his knuckles, and I knew there was no going back,” she writes. There’s a quietness to her voice; you feel as though you’re hearing a smart friend relate a story. Santana sees only a fraction of her patrons face-to-face. She gets glimpses into their lives and what’s important to them by the questions they ask and the ephemera they leave behind in the books they borrow from the library. She takes special care of these items in what she calls her lost and found—things including notes, drawings, and photos of loved ones—tucking them safely in her desk drawer to await the owner. She revels in the marginalia she discovers in the books, from simple notes and definitions to love letters exchanged among the pages of Bonnie & Clyde between an incarcerated woman and her imprisoned man. Above all, this is a deeply human essay, about daily life within an institution that strips the humanity from so many. —KS
5. One Man’s Journey from State Prison to a Revered San Francisco Restaurant
Nico Madrigal-Yankowski | SFGATE | September 14, 2024 | 2,118 words
In 1995 at the age of 16, Michael Thomas killed 14-year-old Gabriel Alcazar Jr. and was sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison. While incarcerated, Thomas fell in love with baking as part of his work in the prison kitchen but never dreamed he’d be able to cook and bake on the outside. Today, he’s honing personal recipes and working four days a week as a prep cook at Flour + Water in San Francisco’s Mission District. You must make time for this beautiful and moving essay about what can happen when someone chooses to see the best in us. —KS
Audience Award
Here’s our most-read pick of the week:
The Jackpot Generation
Katrina Onstad | Maclean’s | September 12, 2024 | 4,825 words
In Canada, millennials, for the most part, are the first generation that doesn’t expect to achieve intergenerational mobility—when kids do better financially than their parents. Housing prices have increased. Inflation is up. Interest rates remain high and wages have not kept pace. It’s hard to find a place to rent; the dream of owning a home has become a figment of the imagination. This is the case for many, but a segment of this population stands to get a huge leg up as aging boomers begin to bequeath their assets to their heirs to the tune $1 trillion over the next several years. Katrina Onstad reports on what the coming wealth windfall could mean for Canada. —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/20/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-532/
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