The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
November 01, 2024 at 03:30PM
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In this edition:
- The Israeli phenomenon of retrieving soldier sperm
- A farewell to the in-flight print magazine
- Remembering a beloved mountain climber
- How to resurrect a ghost river
- Four hours with a music legend
1. Inside Israel’s Fight to Make Fathers of Its Dead Soldiers
Jenny Kleeman | FT Magazine | October 24, 2024 | 5,282 words
Among the most morbid decisions we humans have to make is what to do with our bodies once we’re dead. Do we want to donate our organs? Do we want to be buried, cremated, or composted? Here, Jenny Kleeman pulls back the curtain on a different kind of corporal decision. Since beginning its relentless assault on Gaza last year, the Israeli government has offered the families of biologically male soldiers who die in action the option of postmortem sperm retrieval (PMSR). Kleeman positions the phenomenon as uniquely Israeli. “In a country where many are descendants of Holocaust survivors, family continuation is deemed paramount,” she writes. PMSR can be requested by a dead person’s spouse or parents, regardless of what he may have wanted, and that makes the policy an ethical minefield. Kleeman does a brilliant job mapping it. She interviews medical professionals tasked with preserving sperm, a lawyer vigorously promoting PMSR, families who’ve requested retrieval, some who have used sperm to conceive a child, and an academic who has polled soldiers about the policy. This story doesn’t miss a beat. When the PMSR advocate says, “Don’t ask me about the child’s rights, because there is no such thing,” Kleeman writes, “Of course, I do have to ask her about the child’s rights. . . . When I suggest that a child created in these circumstances might feel the burden of the hopes and expectations of grandparents who fought so hard to have him or her, she bats the idea away. ‘This is bullshit. It’s very nice to be born in a great family that loves you, that worked so hard to have you.’” I can’t stop thinking and talking about this story; there’s just so much to unpack legally, ethically, and otherwise. Ultimately, Kleeman confronts readers with another morbid question: what do the dead owe the living? —SD
2. The Final Flight of the Airline Magazine
Lucy Schiller | Columbia Journalism Review | October 16, 2024 | 2,586 words
Next week is the five-year anniversary of the last time I worked on a print magazine. That the form lingered that long was something of a miracle; its cultural and economic foothold had slipped years before. I still think in magazine, though, and hopefully always will, which makes Lucy Schiller’s elegy for airlines’ in-flight magazines an easy choice for me this week. Hemispheres. American Way. Skylights. Some exist now as QR codes you can scan to access articles, others not at all. But even at their heyday, they felt somehow uncanny. Displaced. Definitely unshareable. (What, you’re going to tell your uncle to check out that great profile on page 73 next time he’s flying to Pittsburgh?) That oddness somehow made them more special, even gave them a pop cachet. They paid journalists and photographers well—selling ads against a circulation of 12 million will do that—and they specialized in a kind of story that everyone could read. Schiller doesn’t just extol their virtues, though; she reports the hell out of the story. The people at the content studios who produced them, the journalists who wrote for them, the academics who analyzed them. And above all, she writes about them like she misses them. Because she does. “It was in a Wi-Fi void, inside of a highfalutin, high-altitude tin can,” she writes, “that the in-flight magazine once thrived, both opulent and casual, an object of simultaneous aspiration and reassurance.” You’d never find them at a newsstand, but somehow their absence from the seat-back pocket feels more meaningful. —PR
3. Worth the Weight?
Michael Gardner | Alpinist | October 10, 2024 | 7,847 words
Sadly, a tragedy brought me to this poetically woven story by climber Michael Gardner. First published in spring 2022, Alpinist is re-featuring it to commemorate Gardner, who passed away this month in his attempt to climb Jannu East. Alpinist editor-in-chief Derek Franz includes a moving tribute note, commenting on Gardner’s warmth, respect, and “appreciation and gratitude for the people in his life.” The same attributes shine through in his writing. The love he feels for his people—his father, his partner, his climbing friends—is paramount in this essay. Gardner begins by describing a climbing expedition with his friend, Sam Hennessey, before darting back through his history to remember experiences with his father, alpinist George Gardner, and his partner, Katie. Small memories like driving in a storm or running to some hot springs are made beautiful and profound by the people he shares them with. It’s this self-awareness that makes the memory of the helicopter retrieval of his father’s body after a fall in the Grand Teton particularly gut-wrenching. Gardner writes of grief with both the passion and numbness it contains. He knew what mountains could cost, and his final reflection on mountaineering is hard to read: “A moment of brilliance, a brief time in the vastness of space, a spark vanishing into the eternal—and all I can do is wonder if it was worth the weight.” —CW
4. Daylighting a Brook in the Bronx
Emily Raboteau | Broadcast | 5,559 words | October 23, 2024
In this thoughtful essay for Broadcast, the editorial arm of Pioneer Works, Emily Raboteau writes about “daylighting”: uncovering a waterway and exposing it to the surface to return it to a more natural state. After Raboteau discovers her house in the Bronx sits on the historic pathway of Tibbetts Brook, she observes the city’s restoration effort to resurrect it. “The brook’s absence seems sad and wrong,” she writes. “I live where something significant was intentionally vanished.” It’s one of the city’s most ambitious green infrastructure projects to date, a way to alleviate sewer and stormwater overflow, and a step toward reversing damage done to the community by past wrongs—redlining, pollution, poor urban planning. I enjoyed following Raboteau as she walks both the planned new route of the brook, “somewhere between nature and not nature,” and its original course, which takes more effort in a place so chaotic and concrete. (“Nevertheless, I blocked out the city’s violent overload, and listened to the water.”) There’s so much to take in here, like the different ways that she and others engage with the area’s riparian history—an art exhibition, a soundwalk, a creative writing exercise. She also asks poignant questions. Who will the brook, and the newly built greenway alongside it, be for? (“Will it invite gentrification? Will it grow too expensive to live here?”) Will all this work be “rendered moot by water tables that rise with the sea”? Her questions that haunt me are the ones contemplating the stream as conscious: “What is the memory of water? Is this captive chapter just a blip in the long life of the brook? Or might the brook be angry, like a poltergeist deranged by degradation, indignity, and concealment?” In exploring what lurks beneath, Raboteau writes a kind of ghost story I did not expect to read this week. —CLR
5. Stevie Nicks: ‘I Believe in the Church of Stevie’
Angie Martoccio | Rolling Stone | October 24, 2024 | 6,580 words
Sometimes I look for escape in my reading, a much-needed break from the news cycle. If I’m lucky, I’ll find the shift in perspective I seek and a little inspiration to boot. Enter Angie Martoccio’s lengthy Rolling Stone interview with Stevie Nicks. I loved this piece for a couple of reasons. It’s clear that Martoccio has done her homework. She establishes such a strong rapport with Nicks that this transcends a mere interview; it feels like a conversation between friends. Nicks and Martoccio tread a lot of ground, though one refrain is about being bold enough to make choices that are right for you as a woman: Nicks talks about not looking back after ending her relationship with Lindsay Buckingham; she discusses the abortion she had while in a relationship with Don Henley in the ’70s; and she relates advising Katy Perry to leave the internet to avoid toxic musical rivalries. Fleetwood Mac may be no more, but Nicks suffers no lack of creative outlets. In addition to writing songs, she wants to spend more time drawing after being on the road for two years. (Nicks was diagnosed with wet macular degeneration and she’s worried she won’t be able to draw if she loses her sight.) “I have so much poetry that just doesn’t make it to the piano,” says Nicks. “Or makes it to the piano and I realize that it’s really just not meant to be a song.” After a lifetime as an artist, Nicks is living proof that inspiration doesn’t happen to you—it’s a happy byproduct of putting in the work. —KS
Audience Award
This week’s most-read pick is . . .
After the Deluge
Jessica Martell and Zackary Vernon | Salvation South | October 19, 2024 | 2,909 words
Transplants, retirees, and second-homers thought western North Carolina would be a refuge from the ravages of climate change. Hurricane Helene thought otherwise. “The mistake of labeling Appalachia as a climate haven is the latest chapter of a long history, wherein Americans project exploitative fantasies onto the region without paying much attention to the realities of the place and the people who live here,” two professors at Appalachian State University write. “Appalachia can’t be a haven for anyone, newcomers or otherwise, if there is no care ethic, no sustainable infrastructure, no forward-thinking leadership, no deep respect for its complexities.” In diary format, the professors recount their experience of the storm and its aftermath. —SD
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/01/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-538/
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