The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
December 06, 2024 at 02:30PM
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
In this edition:
- Reclaiming soil—and one family’s story
- A club of country collectors
- The rise of Big Headlight
- How saints are made
- An alphabetical ode to felines
1. Black Earth
Christina Cooke | The Bitter Southerner | November 25, 2024 | 8,027 words
Patrick Chandler Brown was born a few months after his father was arrested for protesting against North Carolina; the state dumped 40,000 tons of toxic, PCB-laden soil into his community anyway, contaminating the land and water. “That’s how I got my name, PCB — Patrick Chandler Brown,” he says. “I was named after what happened.” Today, Brown farms industrial hemp and vegetables as the owner of the Oakley Grove plantation, land on which his great-grandfather was once enslaved. Industrial hemp helps remediate soil and Brown favors organic and regenerative methods over pesticide-reliant crops such as tobacco. He supports a community hard-pressed to access fresh food with a vegetable box program and works to open up opportunities for Black farmers and entrepreneurs. Christina Cooke’s story flourishes detail by original detail. She uses small brushstrokes of vivid color to paint a portrait of Brown, his farming operation, and his climate and social advocacy work, alongside his family’s long history of community service and activism. “’Now I own it,’ he says, holding in his palm the weighty set of skeleton keys that unlock the doors of Oakley Grove house and the outbuildings surrounding it,” Cooke writes. “While his ancestors were forced to inhabit this place, he is choosing to, and transforming it into a space that serves his needs.” This story is rooted in toxic aggression and environmental racism. But Patrick Chandler Brown has turned the soil. Where once oppression grew and proliferated under the horrors and injustices of slavery, where once the state of North Carolina literally dumped poison on the land, today Oakley Grove plantation is fertile with a new sustainable crop—hope. —KS
2. Is Traveling to Every Country in the World a Worthy Cause? This Group Thinks So.
Tim Neville | Outside | November 25, 2024 | 6,376 words
In this piece for Outside, Tim Neville meets a group of people who have taken collecting to a new level. Mundane baseball cards, royal plates, or postage stamps are not for them. The only stamps these guys are interested in are in their passports. They are collecting the world—country by country. Most Traveled People (MTP) is an online group founded in 2005 by Charles Veley, one of the world’s most traveled people (according to a rule book he created, but still, he’s done a lot). More than 30,000 people have joined and are ranked by points, according to destinations they have reached from the MTP list. Some locations are easy—regular tourist spots—and some are damn hard. Neville joins Veley and a few group members on a trip to a detachment base on “a 2,700-square-mile patch of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains nestled inside Azerbaijan but historically home to a lot of ethnic Armenians, too. The two have been at each other’s throats for generations over this region, with thousands of lives lost.” Not one of the light and breezy destinations. Amid firing Russian Kalashnikovs, skirting military skirmishes, and tipples in tanks, Neville gets to know Veley and his crew. I appreciated his stance, Neville remaining well aware of the “ick” factor in reducing (carbon-heavy) travel down to a list. An avid traveler himself, Neville writes of the “humility and shared experience” that can be gained when traveling; humility I am not sure he feels while wielding an Israeli Uzi alongside Veley. Neville does remain open-minded: not all the group is wealthy, some scoring their trips through the incredibly creative use of airline points, and Veley himself is undeniably badass. But the sense of squeamishness lingers to the end. This thoughtful piece carefully weaves between an adventure story and a contemplation on why we need to do the pointless. A man named Winter, on a quest to visit every Starbucks on earth, has the answer: “Stop moving for long enough and someone will bury you.” But maybe there are better distractions than Starbucks. —CW
3. Asleep at the Wheel in the Headline Brightness Wars
Nate Rogers | The Ringer | December 3, 2024 | 5,310 words
One night earlier this week, I was walking with my dog when a car pulling a slow U-turn nearly blinded us with its headlights. I’ve been annoyed by high beams in my rearview mirror before. Something about this specific incident, though, formed a new, very specific, very irritated question in my head: what the hell is going on with headlights? The next day, I read Nate Rogers’ illuminating (sorry) feature that answers that very question—and raises a number of others that aren’t answered as easily. To begin with, yes, headlight brightness has doubled in the last 10 years. Doubled. That’s largely due to the advent of LED bulbs, but seemingly exacerbated by a combination of outdated safety guidelines and an auto-design arms race that games those guidelines in the name of hilarious-sounding but driver-distracting properties like “down-road punch.” Rogers wisely shepherds us into this mess by beginning with the moderators of the subreddit r/FuckYourHeadlights and other members of the anti-light brigade; it frames the issue accessibly before wading into the vagaries of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 108. And wade he does. Rogers pulls off some admirable reporting in this piece, from car engineers to the doublespeaking world of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But he never loses the reader, perhaps because we too want to know if this comes down to design or selfish drivers. (Spoiler: kinda both, in ways that are impossible to quantify.) Squint just right and you might just see the Tesla that brighted me. —PR
4. Inside the Vatican’s Secret Saint-Making Process
Linda Kinstler | The Guardian | December 3, 2024 | 4,775 words
I used to know a lot about saints. The Catholic school I attended from kindergarten through the eighth grade made us learn all about them. Every Friday in middle school, there was a written test about the saints whose feast days fell in the previous week. I once dressed up as Bernadette of Lourdes for some kind of solemn church pageant. (I chose her because I imagined her to be very beautiful, and because I liked the word “grotto.”) Looking back, I realize that my religion teachers—the moms of classmates whose sole qualification for the gig was being Catholic—only ever referenced the canonization process obliquely in their lessons. We kids were supposed to assume that the people we were learning about were important. They’d passed muster with God as the holiest of humans. What else was there to know? It turns out, a lot. In this feature I never knew I needed, Linda Kinstler takes readers inside the apparatus that the Vatican uses to determine who gets to be a saint. It’s secretive. It’s political. It’s centuries old. In other words, it’s quintessentially Catholic. The most fascinating passages in Kinstler’s piece have to do with miracles. For the uninitiated, a person must have at least two “scientifically inexplicable” miracles attributed to them in order to be canonized. As science advances, the scope of the miraculous narrows, but the church, in typical fashion, doesn’t look to the future as it investigates saintliness. “The question is: what is today the state of the art of medicine? We have to judge from the present moment of knowledge,” a Vatican representative tells Kinstler. “We cannot judge based on what you might discover tomorrow.” Will there come a time when the burden of proof for miracles grows so great the church stops requiring them to expand its pantheon of saints? Perhaps, but I doubt it. Faith, as this piece shows, always finds a way. —SD
5. I Am Cat Lady
Sandra Beasley | VQR | November 1, 2024 | 4,127 words
I’ve had my two cats, Kaia and Ashira, for nearly a decade, but it feels like a lifetime, as if they have always been part of our household. Life with them doesn’t always feel linear, though, and they look and act exactly the same today as they did when we adopted them. Sandra Beasley’s VQR essay on cats and being a cat lady follows a double abecedarian structure: the first letter of each paragraph is guided by alphabetical order, from A to Z and then from Z to A, which plays on this timelessness. Beasley writes about her own cats, Whisky and Sal, and on the sorts of things that we human companions think about. Between me and my husband, am I the cats’ favorite human? Where will we draw the line on the cost of their veterinary care and medical treatments? Sprinkled into some of these alphabetized vignettes are Beasley’s reflections on marriage and life without children. One line in particular gave me pause: “Cats sense grief, a friend tells me, and move toward it.” Still, there is a delightful lightness and randomness throughout, such as the detail about a man at the 2018 Wichita Cat Fancy Cat Show who “wore his cinnamon-and-white Sphynx draped across the back of his broad shoulders,” or the image of young Beasley trying to teach her childhood cat Iditarod commands: “I ran circles around our basement, leash in hand, all the while shouting ‘Mush!’ at a confused cat.” While you don’t need to be a cat person to appreciate Beasley’s piece, I’ll bet one of my cats’ lives that you’ll enjoy it more if you are. —CLR
Audience Award
Tangled Justice
John J. Lennon | The New York Review of Books | November 19, 2024 | 4,499 words
Fifteen-year-old Paula Cooper murdered Ruth Pelke in 1985, stabbing the elderly bible studies teacher over 30 times. There were accomplices, however Cooper was the only one sentenced to death after Jack Crawford, Lake County’s head prosecutor, did some illegal judge shopping. Crawford aspired to political office and knew that for murder, “66 percent of Americans favor a death sentence.” John J. Lennon reviews Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy by Alex Mar, viewing Paula Cooper’s case and circumstances through the lens of his own perspective on punishment and justice as a man incarcerated for 25 years-to-life for murder, drug sales, and gun possession. —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/06/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-542/
via IFTTT
Watch