The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
October 18, 2024 at 03:30PM
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In this week’s edition:
• One love story, hold the meet-cute
• America’s uneasy partnership with a human rights abuser
• The myth of Japanese minimalism
• Essays as architecture
• England’s last court reporters
1. A Shark Attack and a Terrorist Bombing: This Is a Love Story
Paul Kix | Esquire | October 14, 2024 | 8,689 words
If calamity has a silver lining, it’s that it tends to bring people together. Ask the North Carolinians and Floridians coming together to rebuild after catastrophic flooding. Ask the New Yorkers who walked toward the danger on 9/11. Ask the people in recovery who get sober and find their life’s mission in serving fellow addicts. Ask Colin Cook and Sydney Corcoran, whose lives were upended thousands of miles apart by twin disasters—and then grew toward one another, ultimately intertwining. Colin lost his leg to a shark while surfing in Hawaii; Sydney nearly bled out after shrapnel from the Boston Marathon bombing pierced her femoral artery. Separately, they groped toward healing, until their mothers met at a prosthetic center and hatched a plan. Paul Kix tells their stories beautifully for Esquire, chronicling their courtship with the same unflinching detail he uses to recount their life-altering traumas. He doesn’t just reconstruct, though. He inhabits. And in the process, he enables a feature in which you live alongside the characters, even inside them. Like this moment, capturing Sydney fighting to stay conscious in an ambulance: “I know I’m going, she thought, and I had an okay run. A spreading serene sensation. Still the low rumble of tires over Boston’s streets, still the syncopated movements of a person, or people, carrying out tasks with urgency, but now a warmth of care emanated from these others, mirroring the warmth that spread inside Sydney. This is one of the most peaceful moments I have ever known, she thought.” This is a love story, as the headline says, but it’s also a special story. It’ll make you feel things. Some horror, sure, but mostly hope. —PR
2. America’s Monster
Matthieu Aikins | The New York Times Magazine | May 22, 2024 | 8,130 words
Once upon a time, when I was in graduate school studying international relations, I had a conversation with a fellow student about torture. She was a TA for a class on ethics, and the topic was coming up on the syllabus. To her mind—and I agreed—entertaining discussion about whether torture “works” was a moot exercise from an ethical standpoint. You could try to justify torture as useful or necessary, but never as ethical, because by definition it is not. I found myself thinking about this conversation while reading Matthieu Aikins’s investigation of Afghan General Abdul Raziq, a US ally who, with the knowledge of his Pentagon backers, killed, disappeared, and tortured hundreds, if not thousands of people during the war with the Taliban. Aikins situates Raziq within the context of the US military’s counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy, which emphasized winning “hearts and minds” by refusing to “ignore or tacitly accept abuse of power, corruption, or marginalization” (to quote General Stanley McChrystal). US authorities boasted that COIN wasn’t just a more humane way of waging war—it was also more effective than traditional methods. Yet all the while, they were doing nothing to stop Raziq precisely because, within his remit as police chief of Kandahar, his violence seemed to keep the Taliban at bay. “The comforting myth that brutality is always counterproductive . . . obscures how violence functions,” Aikins writes. “This myth, sold to the public as COIN, is part of a larger pattern of dishonesty that runs through America’s longest war, 20 years of wishful thinking and willful ignorance.” In addition to this thoughtful framing, one of things I admire most about Aikins’s work here is that it draws from a well of knowledge filled over years of painstaking reporting. Aikins, who wrote stories about Raziq for Harper’s and The Atlantic more than a decade ago, never stopped digging into the general’s legacy. When the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, Aikins embraced the opportunity to write the definitive story about Raziq, his abuses, and what they revealed about US military and political failures. It was a profound demonstration of staying on a reporting beat, and the result is one of the most consequential pieces of journalism I’ve read since the end of the war. —SD
3. The Joy of Clutter
Matt Alt | Aeon | October 11, 2024 | 5,551 words
On a solo adventure to Tokyo 20 years ago, I wandered in awe, taking in the sensory and visual experience of the city. My first morning, I strolled the serene and meticulously kept grounds of a Shinto shrine, then later emerged onto a bustling street of shops, each packed with an artful chaos of electronics and toys. I remember being drawn to the juxtaposition of these distinct approaches to stuff and space, and Matt Alt’s delightful Aeon essay whisked me right back. He writes about the foreign obsession with Japan’s material culture, notably its “subtractive” philosophy as reflected in immaculate tea houses and perfectly raked Zen gardens. The West, defaulting to this idealized imagery, has viewed Japan’s design sensibilities over time as a paragon of elevated taste and meticulous minimalism. But Alt, who has lived in Tokyo for over 20 years, writes that the country isn’t as tidy as it’s perceived to be, and that the obsession with minimalism, and the self-help and domestic cleaning movement that paved the way for Marie Kondo, reflects our own anxieties and consumerist urges. The real Japan is messy, cluttered. Alt describes the flip side of Japanese minimalism as “aesthetic accumulation”: carefully cluttered spaces that are as sublime as the tidy ones we tend to admire. I think of the cute DIY miniature bookshop kit I once bought but have never assembled—books and curiosities crammed and arranged on the walls, cherry blossoms and red lanterns dotting its exterior. I also think of how my daughter displays her tiny toy collections in plain sight—food erasers, cat figurines, Calico Critters dioramas, and stuff galore that covers every inch of empty space on our shelves. Have we been wrong all these years to think of clutter as undesirable? Can this sort of maximalism bring joy? “The nation may or may not possess the magic of tidying up,” Alt writes of Japan, “but its untidy spaces can be magical in their own rights.” A refreshing read that makes me want to go home and embrace the mess. —CLR
4. The Essay as Realm
Elisa Gabbert | The Georgia Review | August 27, 2024 | 4,541 words
For The Georgia Review, poet Elisa Gabbert considers the essay through the lens of architecture—one of her personal fascinations. But know that this piece is far more than a serviceable analogy comparing words, sentences, and ideas to bricks, mortar, and beams. Gabbert examines the way carefully designed buildings and essays make you feel, as well as some of the techniques that authors and architects share as they labor over their particular scaffolding. There’s a lot I loved about this essay—Gabbert confesses to being a fellow rereader who enjoys revisiting pieces and discovering new resonance. (To me, rereading feels like preparing a favorite homemade soup. It’s a tiny bit different every time, but always wonderful.) “When I’m writing, I’m trying to be an architect,” she writes. “I’m trying to get the reader to feel the way I do; even when I don’t intend to convince them of something . . . writing is a subtly coercive act. The coercion is cooperative, like any performance.” Reading this essay reminded me of being a kid and going to double feature matinées on Saturday afternoons with my younger brother. When we emerged from the darkness of the theater, inspired by fictional worlds and high on suspended disbelief, we felt empowered, aware that life could be very different in a very good way. I feel like a great piece of writing like Gabbert’s essay creates this same feeling: when we’re lost in the power of connections, anything is possible. —KS
5. Chortle Chortle, Scribble Scribble: Inside the Old Bailey with Britain’s Last Court Reporters
Sophie Elmhirst | The Guardian | July 11, 2024 | 4,689 words
This week, I have reached back and pulled a piece from the heady summer days of July. I missed it then, and maybe you did, too. Even if not, it is worth a second look. I’m a longtime fan of Sophie Elmhirst and her wry and dry character studies, and she does not disappoint here. Her main subject is Guy Toyn, a court reporter for the Old Bailey, who suits its creaking machinations perfectly. With a booming voice that lacks a filter, Toyn relays court life by mimicking various characters, including Idiot Judge, Pretentious Barrister, Moaning Gen Z, and Miscellaneous Drunk. He is unapologetically old school—which seems to put Elmhirst a bit on edge—but also wonderfully theatrical. Elmhirst watches him pull trousers over his red shorts and T-shirt to go into court and chuckle loudly over a smuggling case that involved cocaine secreted inside bananas. This world is portrayed with delightful aplomb: Elmhirst’s descriptions of the press quarters, a “suite of rooms in terminal decline,” made me feel I could see the “disconcerting” yellow stains on the red-swirled carpet, detect the light smell of toast, and feel the bizarreness of the “museum-worthy beige laptops” stacked amongst old shoes and ladders. Toyn takes his job seriously—after all, he is, as Elmhirst explains, reporting on what happens in these courts “in all its variety and ugliness, because people should know what was happening on their streets, in their towns, in the darker recesses of society.” Not all of Toyn’s stories get picked up by the national press (as Toyn notes, they want stories of “a woman killing a man, ideally a middle-class white woman killing a man”), but on his website, Court News UK, he reports what happens behind every door. Toyn cannot take his eyes off the kaleidoscope of stories these courts hold. His own story is just as fascinating. —CW
Audience Award
Which story did our readers love the most this week?
The Texan Doctor and the Disappeared Saudi Princesses
Heidi Blake | The New Yorker | October 10, 2024 | 5,041 words
This is a disturbing insight into the lives of four Saudi princesses imprisoned in a palace compound by their father, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. Abdullah, despite proclaiming himself a champion of women’s rights, mercilessly dominated his daughters. Heidi Blake discovers some of his means of control (sedation and alcohol) from Dwight Burdick, a private physician to the Saudi royal family, who bravely speaks out after learning of the deaths of two of the princesses—while they still lived in isolation. —CW
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/18/top-5-longreads-536/
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