The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
February 21, 2025 at 04:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this week’s Top 5:
- Chilling Chilean forensic anthropology
- An empathetic park ranger
- Teaching migration to unruly birds
- Fear in America’s schools
- The Victorian vendors of cat meat
1. Grave Mistakes: The History and Future of Chile’s ‘Disappeared’
Fletcher Reveley | Undark Magazine | February 19, 2025 | 9,195 words
I’ve read some fascinating forensics stories in the past year, and this haunting piece by Fletcher Reveley digs into how Chile has applied the science, unfortunately to disastrous results, in crimes of mass atrocity. For Flor Lazo, the past 50 years have been a “long, long, long, long road in search of the truth.” Her father, two brothers, and two uncles were among the more than 1,000 people who were forcibly disappeared after the 1973 coup, under Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. Reveley describes how in the late ’80s, forensic anthropologists began to investigate the regime’s mass graves. A series of scientific errors by the state’s forensic unit, the Servicio Médico Legal, marred the effort, misidentifying victims and delivering bodies to the wrong families. (For years, Lazo visited the grave containing what she believed was her brother Rodolfo’s remains, but after the bones were later exhumed—without her family’s knowledge—she learned that they were not his.) Reveley writes about the devastating affect these grievous mistakes have on victims’ loved ones: “For many of the affected relatives, the impact was seismic, forever altering their relationship to science, the state, and the notion of truth itself.” DNA analysis, remote-sensing technology, and a new initiative under Chile’s current president hold the promise of uncovering the remains of more victims, but as Reveley shows, Lazo and other Chileans continue to grapple with the injustice of these killings and hope for closure that they may never get. This is a meticulously reported account of a dark part of Chilean history, but also the extraordinary journey of families who have shown resilience over a lifetime of suffering. —CLR
2. Her Job is to Remove Homeless People from SF’s Parks. Her Methods are Extraordinary
Susan Freinkel | The San Francisco Standard | February 8, 2025 | 4,975 words
At the end of December 2024, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual Homelessness Assessment Report stated that over 770,000 people were unhoused in the United States in January 2024—an 18-percent increase over 2023. That’s over a quarter of a million people, each with a complex story. Patrick Fealey recently told his for Esquire. An outpouring of support put a roof over Fealey’s head, but for many, the status quo is very different. In this gripping and emotional piece at The San Francisco Standard, Susan Freinkel introduces us to Kevin Horton and Ronnie Morrisette, two men who lived in Golden Gate Park for different reasons; both faced frustrating barriers to housing. That’s where outreach worker Amanda Barrows comes in. Barrows grew up in Boston public housing. Before becoming a park ranger in 2021, she had, for five years, lived without a fixed address after moving to San Francisco with “$200 and two bags” at age 19. Freinkel followed the ranger for two years, learning how Barrows watched out for Horton, Morrisette, and others living in the park. Barrows started by simply caring: “She didn’t cite Morrisette at that first meeting (though later she would), which surprised him, since he was used to being hassled by rangers. Even more surprising was that she asked if he needed help. ‘Amanda was the first park ranger I heard saying that spiel,’ he recalls.” Barrows did wellness checks and offered small kindnesses, like allowing Morrisette to charge his phone in her truck. Barrows developed a rapport and built trust with each man; slowly, they allowed her to help them navigate the “‘arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks’ necessary just to be eligible for housing.” Neither man’s story is linear. There are small victories and frustrating setbacks. Feinkel’s thoughtful piece makes you root hard for Horton, Morrisette, and Barrows, and for everyone to get what we all deserve: shelter, of course, but above all, just a little bit of peace. —KS
3. The Long Flight to Teach an Endangered Ibis Species to Migrate
Nick Paumgarten | The New Yorker | February 10, 2025 | 7,587 words
I have a new bird feeder, in which I am rather too invested. (I suspect the number of bird pictures I post in the group chat may be doing little for my street cred.) A few days ago, a whole flock of red-winged blackbirds descended on it. Loudly trilling to each other, they carefully lined up along the feeder pole to wait their turn before rising together in a wispy black cloud to continue their spring migration north. Migration fascinates me: I watch Canada geese fleeing the snow in their perfect “V” formations in the fall with trepidation—winter is coming—and delight in their return each spring (which seems to come earlier every year). But how do all these birds know where to travel to? Once the instinct kicks in, who picks the direction? Turns out they have to learn. In this fascinating essay, Nick Paumgarten joins a team of scientists and volunteers dedicated to reintroducing the northern bald ibis back into the wild in Europe—including teaching young birds raised in captivity how to migrate across the Pyrenees to Spain. Bald ibises are strange-looking; they are big and gangly, with a long beak reminiscent of a gnarled toenail. The people escorting these odd birds south are a motley crew: two “bird mothers,” various volunteers, a documentary film team, and Johannes Fritz, the project leader, “a Tyrolian biologist in an olive-drab flight suit and amber shooting glasses.” No one is allowed near the birds except the bird mothers, who have raised them since they were chicks, which gives the whole enterprise a slightly cult-like feel. (One of the filmmakers bemoans being given “a terrible bollocking from one of the bird mothers yesterday for walking too close to the birds[.]”) The idea: The birds follow a bird mother and Fritz in a microlight, an idea conceived from that classic ’90s heartwarmer, “Fly Away Home.” It does not always go according to plan. Like proper teenagers, sometimes these birds would rather just hang out than learn to do something. It’s a bizarre, painstaking project, brilliantly told by Paumgarten. Sure, there is some science, but the image of the toenail birds flying after the man in the boiler suit is what will stick with you. —CW
4. After All This
Dana Salvador | The Sun | February 9, 2025 | 2,746 words
In Nashville, Tennessee, a 17-year-old student shot and killed a 16-year-old classmate in a school cafeteria. In Huntsville, Alabama, a gunshot sounded at an elementary school during dismissal; the gun was later found in a second-grader’s backpack. School officials found guns in the possession of high school students in Georgia, Ohio, and Florida. A father of a slain Parkland student told the press he planned no special acknowledgment for the anniversary of the shooting that killed his son and sixteen others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School; instead, “We choose to remind people daily . . . that this is a reality that has been normalized in our country.” In Westminster, Colorado, a student paralyzed in the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School died at the age of 43; a coroner said the cause of death was “likely related to complications” linked to the shooting. These incidents, and more, all occurred during the past month. In college, Dana Salvador watched coverage of the Columbine shooting with her roommates, all teachers in training. “In the weeks that followed, our education professors calmed our fears,” she writes for The Sun. “They discussed the rarity of such an event; they predicted that dramatic shifts would happen.” Now, she writes, “of the group of would-be teachers who watched the news from Columbine that day in April 1999, I am the only one still teaching.” In her unrelenting essay, Salvador navigates the history of school shootings in America and details her own experiences with threats and lockdowns, granting generous, detailed access to her own anxious mind throughout. On the school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, Salvador reminds us that officials first “blamed a mass shooting on a teacher and a faulty side door,” then asks readers to read that line again. Do the same with Salvador’s essay. Read it once, then again. Sit with your discomfort. And if you don’t feel any, ask yourself why not. —BF
5. The Cat’s Meat Man
Kathryn Hughes | The Public Domain Review | February 12, 2025 | 2,009 words
Somewhere in my drafts folder sits a long blog post about how I don’t know anything about history. (Apologies to Sam Cooke.) Little things, sure—I’ll never forget the year the Battle of Hastings was fought, for some reason—but my grasp of “world history” is absolutely shameful. I’ve thought more about this recently, and I think my issue is that too much history writing is boring. You know what’s not boring? Kathryn Hughes’s piece about the “itinerant offal vendors” who crisscrissed Victorian London, selling horsemeat to cat owners. At one point, she writes, there were 1,000 pushcarts traversing the city, feeding 300,000 cats. These were men bound by a code: They respected each other’s turf, and were up with the sun “threading the chunks onto wooden skewers, to make up anything from a ha’penny snack to a three-penny feast.” Hughes surveys the phenomenon with agility and verve, skipping from true crime (early speculation that Jack the Ripper may have been a cat’s meat man) to the spectacle of a 1901 grand banquet held for these hardworking friends of felines. What really brings this piece to life, though, is the wealth of archival materials that accompies it: photos, magazine illustrations, and postcards that span more than a century. This is history not as a dry excavation, but as a living, meowing, offal-reeking tour of the past. I may not know anything about World War I, but at least now I can horrify friends with tales of horse kebabs and the men who peddled them. —PR
Audience Award
The most-read editor’s pick of the week:
After Lorne
Reeves Wiedeman | New York Magazine | February 11, 2025 | 8,419 words
Susan Morrison’s biography of Lorne Michaels, which just hit bookstore shelves, is incredibly well reported and written. It’s also an authorized biography—which is even more apparent after you read Reeves Wiedeman’s penetrating New York feature about the future of Saturday Night Live. Wiedeman circumnavigates Michaels’ infamous power and reach by utilizing various source-protection methods, none of which lessen the impact of the jaw-dropping anecdotes and candor from NBC executives and cast members. I’ve read a lot about this show and Lorne Michaels, but I don’t think I’ve ever read something that cuts past the mythmaking quite so keenly. —PR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/21/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-551/
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