The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
October 11, 2024 at 03:30PM
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In this week’s edition:
• Researching climate change from on (very) high
• The quasi-models who helped Notre-Dame rise again
• How migraines elude our understanding—and our best efforts
• Seeking solace beyond the veil
• The pros and cons of turning your home into a daycare facility
1. When the Arctic Melts
Elizabeth Kolbert | The New Yorker | October 7, 2024 | 8,090 words
For The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert visits Greenland to witness climate change firsthand. Her first stop: N.S.F. Summit Station, a research facility that sits more than 10,000 feet above sea level. There, she begins to explain the volatile history of our planet’s climate. As Kolbert notes, scientists believe there have been at least 10 ice ages over the past 2.5 million years, initiated by Jupiter and Saturn’s influence on Earth. The big planets can shift Earth’s orbit slightly, and how our planet reacts to this interplanetary tug can set new temperature patterns in motion. At Summit, there’s so much to learn—even from the snow that has fallen on Greenland over the past 2,000 years. While climate change reading is almost always understandably and justifiably fraught, the tone here leans more toward wonder; Kolbert pairs deep curiosity and respect for the Earth, and offers much-needed context on our planet’s ever-changing ways. “Much of the new science suggests that the climate is, all on its own, unstable, prone to dramatic and sometimes sudden shifts,” she writes. While humans have undoubtedly helped accelerate global warming and changing weather patterns, it was sobering to learn that our role is but one piece of a very large, complex, and fascinating puzzle. —KS
2. The Miraculous Resurrection of Notre-Dame
Joshua Hammer | GQ | September 17, 2024 | 4,716 words
Last month, on a visit to Paris, my mom and I decided to walk by Notre-Dame one afternoon. The cathedral, which has been off-limits to visitors since it caught fire in 2019, was surrounded by scaffolding; cranes loomed overhead. But there was still much to see, including an art exhibit of sorts. Pasted onto the plywood construction barrier in front of the cathedral were black-and-white glamour photos of the people restoring Notre-Dame to its former glory. There was the chief sculptor holding a chisel to the curved nose of a gargoyle. A painting restorer and curator clutching a handful of brushes. The spire openwork levels wooden framework foreman—try squeezing that onto your business card—with a hammer hanging from his belt. Even the food services team had a photo. I was moved by this public celebration of artistry and labor, and I found myself spending as much time with the photos as I did with paintings at the Louvre. So it was with enormous interest and delight that I read Joshua Hammer’s feature about Notre-Dame’s resurrection, which focuses on the decision to employ people skilled in traditional carpentry and engineering practices. Hammer gets to don a hard hat and go into the cathedral, scheduled to reopen to the public this December, to view the results of five years of painstaking work. “Instead of the smoothness of timber squared in sawmills, the beams had a rough, undulating quality,” he writes of the massive roof frame. “Each imperfection reflected the vagaries of the grain, the shape of the axe, and the hewing style.” As the project manager tells Hammer, artisans have done more than give Notre-Dame its shape back. “It has a soul,” he says. —SD
3. A Head Is a Territory of Light
Tan Tuck Ming | The Yale Review | October 8, 2024 | 3,078 words
Everyone feels physical pain, yet it’s nearly impossible to understand another person’s version. One person’s moderate is another person’s unbearable. One person’s itch is another person’s burn. It’s a maddening, slippery phenomenon—which makes Tan Tuck Ming’s essay about his lifelong migraines even more fascinating. Not only does he capture his all-consuming discomfort in a spare poetry, but he does so in service of a disorder that is infamous for its undefinability. Every person has a different trigger, every person has a different set of symptoms. Yet, Ming’s search for control manages to feel universal. After all, we’ve all engaged in magical thinking, all flattened coincidence into cause in hopes of easing our own suffering. And it’s hard to fool the body. “Each migraine is a record of its own significance,” he writes, “a moment when a set of circumstances triggered certain phenomena. Over a month, the records make a sequence; over a lifetime, a diagnosis; over generations, a correspondence.” By embracing the very illumination that so often accompanies his migraines, Ming delivers all three. —PR
4. What It Means to Speak With the Dead
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi | Jewish Currents | August 12, 2024 | 2,001 words
In this essay, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi recounts a Zoom session with a psychic medium. The session took place 230 days after October 7, 2023, a soul-numbing period of time during which “[a]wareness of the dead has become like constant humidity,” he writes. “It coats me.” At the start, Tbakhi tells Lawrence, the medium, that he doesn’t know what he wants out of the experience. “What do I owe the mass of dead suffusing my days?” is the question he really wants to ask, but he is doubtful the medium can handle channeling the horrors of genocide: “I imagine poor Lawrence flooded with martyrs, speaking in tongues out of his eyes and mouth and nose and ears, all very Poltergeist, the computer glitching and I never hear from him again.” Instead, Tbakhi turns his thoughts to two people he knew who recently passed on to the other side. Lawrence appears to connect with one of them, a friend and teacher named Dan. Is it really Dan’s spirit? How did they conjure him? “I wonder if this is what it means to speak with the dead: You make a familiar shape and fill it with what you need,” Tbakhi writes. The session ends without any sort of revelation. But later, after a comforting conversation with another friend who also knew Dan, Tbakhi realizes the experience was exactly what he was seeking. Perhaps it’s not what was communicated between Dan and the medium that was important, but rather what was shared and remembered between the two living friends who knew and cared for him. I’m reminded of my family’s last trip to England, when we took our 6-year-old daughter to the grave of her grandpa, my father-in-law; to our surprise, she has mentioned him on a few separate occasions since that visit, making lovely connections from that tombstone to our world of the living. This piece is short but poignant, exploring faith and grief in a time of genocide. It carries a lot of emotional weight, whether or not you believe in the beyond. —CLR
5. My Accidental Daycare
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian | The Cut | October 9, 2024 | 6,855 words
At the start of this piece, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is busy sniffing out a strange smell wafting from her kitchen, which—spoiler—turns out to be dog excrement. That beginning sets a candid tone for an essay in which Abrahamian throws the door wide open to a chaotic period of her life. Evicted by a cartoon-villain-esque New York landlord, her children’s daycare shuts down, leading Abrahamian to take in a pod of displaced under-fours (some of whom enjoy feeding her dog diarrhea-inducing tidbits). Take a moment to reflect on the maelstrom one small toddler can inflict upon a home. Now imagine as many as seven of them. In a two-bedroom house. Every day. Turning her home into a temporary daycare was meant to help stressed-out parents for a few days, but weeks go by as Abrahamian watches her old nursery struggle against the endless bureaucracy required to reopen at a new location. Wading into the fray, she develops a forensic interest in the rules around emergency exits, student-teacher ratios, and background checks. Her disbelief at bureacratic pedantry reaches a fever pitch as her desperation increases, resulting in a scene reminiscent of Judy Hopps and Flash the Sloth at the DMV in Zootopia. If you are wavering on reading over 6,000 words on the woes of parents who have the resources to pore over daycare rules and regulations, I can assure you that the level of emotion brought to this child-sized saga is worth it. —CW
Audience Award
What was our most-read pick of the week? The envelope, please.
65 Doctors, Nurses, and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza
Feroze Sidhwa | The New York Times | October 9, 2024 | 3,731 words
Doctor Feroze Sidwha, who spent a few weeks last spring working in Gaza, collaborated with The New York Times to poll 65 volunteer health care workers about their experiences in the besieged region since October 7. Some findings: 63 of those polled observed “severe malnutrition”; 52 saw “nearly universal psychiatric distress in young children and saw some who were suicidal or said they wished they had died”; 44 witnessed “multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest.” (The IDF declined to directly answer questions about the targeting of children.) All the while, the US has continued to arm Israel. —SD
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/11/top-5-longreads-535/
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