The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
November 22, 2024 at 03:30PM
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Featuring:
- An uncomfortable firsthand account of homelessness
- The politics of a ranch murder
- Lessons from an aloof horse
- Emulating nature’s gift economy
- Simmering tensions in London’s heart
1. The Invisible Man
Patrick Fealey | Esquire | November 14, 2024 | 9,552 words
You’ve read reports about the homelessness crisis. You’ve heard the voices of those experiencing homelessness and seen the analysis of the many, many factors that have contributed to the surge. But you’ve likely not read a more searing firsthand account of what it’s like to be unhoused in this country. Patrick Fealey has been a writer for his entire life; first as an award-winning newspaper reporter and critic, then as an unemployed one struggling with manic depression, then as one living in his car in a coastal Rhode Island town, writing all day on an old laptop plugged into the lighter and sleeping in a Walmart parking lot at night. Fealey has no illusions about the medications he needs to function, or the beer he needs to cope with his current circumstances. He also has no illusions about the parade of police officers who confront him under shaky pretense, the social safety net that’s never enough, or the people who avoid even acknowledging his existence. “If ‘I think, therefore I am’ is true,” he writes, “we are people who are. We are, and we stand on this ground. If you deny us ground, you are denying us our ‘I am.’ Isn’t that negation of our existence? We are here and we are you and we are yours.” Fealey saves his lyricism for his fiction and poetry; his prose needs no embellishment to cut through your defenses. The uncertainty, the instability, the danger that pervades his life worms off the page and into your brain. I don’t know if Fealey is still on the street, or if the payment for this story helped him get out of his car and into some permanent housing. But I do know that even if he’s somewhere warm and safe, there are many hundreds of thousands who aren’t—and his piece makes sure no one who reads it will ever forget that fact. —PR
2. Death in Nogales
S.C. Cornell | The New York Review of Books | November 16, 2024 | 4,107 words
On its face, this is a story about a death and subsequent legal trial. On January 30, 2023, a Mexican man named Gabriel Cuen Buitimea who had just crossed the border near Nogales, Arizona, was shot dead by a rancher named George Alan Kelly. (His defense has suggested someone else might have been responsible for the shooting; there is no evidence to support that claim.) But the specifics of what happened that day and later at Kelly’s murder trial form more than just a compelling narrative. They also serve as a vehicle for an examination of a terrible, urgent question: Why are so many Americans eager to kill people at the country’s doorstep, or at least to let them die there? S.C. Cornell weaves the history of border patrol with a reading of contemporary politics to show how the border functions as a dehumanizing device. When people cross it, or in some cases simply approach it, their lives don’t just cease to matter—they become fair game. “As both parties continue to militarize the border,” Cornell writes, “Republicans have begun to give voice to what is hard not to see as a longing to kill.” This has seeped into the wider public consciousness—or perhaps it flows both ways. Many of Kelly’s supporters, for instance, insisted that shooting Buitimea was the “patriotic” thing to do. Cornell’s story is chilling in its clarity and punctuated with reminders of the hypocrisies at work in popular mythologies about the border. For instance, Kelly lives off social security, “a fund that undocumented immigrants prop up.” Still, he keeps an AK-47 by his door, just in case the people helping pay for his existence happen to pass by. —SD
3. He Thought He Knew Horses. Then He Learned to Really Listen.
Sterry Butcher | The New York Times Magazine | November 12, 2024 | 3,896 words
There’s a lot I loved about Sterry Butcher’s New York Times Magazine profile of horseman Warwick Schiller and Sherlock, the seemingly detached horse who changed Schiller’s life. There are fascinating horse facts. (Did you know that horses form friendships based on trust and mutual benefit and equine pals rake their teeth across each other’s necks to scratch the place they can’t reach?) There is Schiller, the main character, an experienced horseman used to training not only horses but their people as well. There is Sherlock the equine foil, an emotionally flat horse-as-puzzle. This piece, however, is about far more than one old dog learning a new trick. To connect with Sherlock, Schiller had to stand still and watch. Closely. Sherlock responded when he felt seen. By observing the most minute stimulus and Sherlock’s response, Schiller came to understand that the horse wasn’t detached at all—he was exceptionally nuanced in how he communicated his discomfort as a prey animal. Schiller discovered that he needed to understand and deal with his own emotions and past trauma to become fully present for horses and humans alike. “Working with the horse awakened Schiller to other aspects of his own character,” writes Butcher. “Old habits, like an inclination to talk at people instead of to people, started to fall away. ‘It’s from horses where I learned to listen,’ he says. ‘Listening instead of telling.’” This piece has many lessons, but perhaps the most compelling takeaway is that just when you think you might know it all, you understand there’s still so much left to learn. —KS
4. Gift Thinking
Robin Wall Kimmerer and Jenny Odell | Orion | November 19, 2024 | 2,698 words
Over the past year, I’ve noticed a hardcover edition of Braiding Sweetgrass on our shelf. It’s my husband’s book, and I’ve never opened it. But after reading this inspiring conversation between Jenny Odell and the book’s author, Potawatomi scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, I pulled it off the shelf; I wanted to read more from Kimmerer. My favorite reads this year encourage us to look at nature for solutions to our many failing human systems. In this discussion, they talk about Kimmerer’s new book, The Serviceberry, and circularity and reciprocity in the natural world. Everything that is consumed is regenerated; nothing goes to waste. “I mean, think of it,” says Kimmerer, “every breath we take is oxygen exhaled by plants, a so-called waste product.” In turn, we exhale carbon dioxide, which goes right back to plants in a cycle that most of us take for granted: “It’s the ultimate biological poetry, my breath is your breath, and life is magnified by the exchange. Shouldn’t human economies emulate this?” Odell and Kimmerer discuss what a gift economy looks like: humans embracing responsibility, learning from healthy and biodiverse ecosystems, and cultivating mutually beneficial relationships that coevolve over time (versus relationships that extract and destroy). We may not always see them, but there are gifts all around us: light, water, plants, soil. Kimmerer asks: “Are there ways we might begin to rehabilitate our ability to see things as the gifts they are?” She urges us to pay attention to nature: “It’s an act of resistance to reclaim your attention from what the market wants of you.” As an interviewer, Odell’s anecdotes and observations are equally insightful—I love her thoughts about water, the giving-and-getting of gardening, and the benefits of shared physical work. The whole conversation is a gift. —CLR
5. Last Days of Soho
Francisco Garcia | The Fence | November 12, 2024 | 3,430 words
I used to work in a post-production house in Soho, London. I remember self-importantly carrying tapes between edit suites (yes, tapes) and eating a lot of free biscuits meant for clients. I thought I was pretty cool. I wasn’t—Soho was the cool one. The narrow streets emanated vibrancy from every colorful nook and bustling alley. Drinking warm beer on a street corner outside a packed, steamy pub, I would watch deals go down (business and drugs on equal cadence), pity lost tourists peering at the street names set hopelessly high on brick walls, tut at young fops in salmon-pink trousers and raised collars meandering over to Soho House, and feel the warmth of couples embracing under historic arches. It felt alive, on the cusp of something more. Transient. Not once did I consider the actual residents of Soho—until now. In this piece for The Fence, Francisco Garcia explores the underlying tensions in this tightly packed square mile of central London, reporting on a “three-way stand-off between ‘business,’ local authority, and residents.” (Pedestrianization and al fresco dining are particular points of contention.) The steady gentrification of Soho drastically diminished residents from the heady days of 1881, when they numbered 16,608. Only 2,600 or so stalwarts remain, many of whom are “long-term social housing tenants, rather than recalcitrant millionaires.” But despite depleted numbers, a robust community organization called The Soho Society is still taking umbrage at many new development plans, much to the chagrin of property developers like Soho Estates (run by John James, the larger-than-life son-in-law of a former Soho porn baron). I appreciated Garcia making me think about this area in a new way—and making a land dispute fascinating. I was filled with nostalgia as he entered those magic streets, walking along as “[p]ost-theatre punters spilled out of the theatres, to mingle with the spirited dregs of the post-work crowd,” reaching a “pile of fresh sick . . . proudly splatted outside the entrance to Tottenham Court Road.” Good times. —CW
Audience Award
Our most-read editor’s pick of the week is:
Schools vs. Screens
Luc Rinaldi | Maclean’s | November 12, 2024 | 4,531 words
This past fall, several Canadian provinces banned students from using cell phones in class. Designed to help students focus more effectively in school, the measure was trotted out by governments with a lot of fanfare and little guidance on how to implement the plan, leaving teachers responsible for enforcement and in some cases, liable when the phones they confiscate are lost or damaged. —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/22/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-541/
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