Downtown Anchorage after the 1964 earthquake. Photo by U.S. Geological Survey; public domain.
A highly personal five-year running list, sorted first by year and then alphabetical by author.
2021
Nikki Haley’s Time for Choosing
Tim Alberta, Politico
The type of surefooted, readable profile that comes from interviewing nearly 70 friends, associates, donors, staffers, and former colleagues.
An Act of God
Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker
A Pentecostal minister in Brazil, with six churches and thousands of followers, is brought down after her husband’s murder.
The “Herald Square Bomber” Who Wasn’t
Rozina Ali, The New York Times Magazine
How a 21-year-old refugee with a 78 I.Q. was entrapped and convicted of terrorism charges—after he refused to carry out a bombing.
In a Small Town, a Battle for Racial Justice Confronts a Bloody Past and an Uncertain Future
Carli Brosseau, ProPublica and The News and Observer
The definitive story of Alamance County, North Carolina, where BLM activists regularly face down neo-Confederates.
Swab Story
Olivia Carville, Bloomberg Businessweek
Two cousins who hate each other control the country’s Covid-19 swab supply.
The Limits of Liberalism
Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker
A profile of Derrick Bell, the legal scholar behind Critical Race Theory.
Owen Wilson Is Doing Great, Thanks
Ryan D’Agostino, Esquire
A celebrity profile with surprises in every paragraph.
The Last Days Inside Trailer 83
Hannah Dreier, The Washington Post
Two wildfire survivors, one partially paralyzed from a stroke, face eviction from their temporary FEMA home.
“Don’t Tell Me What To Do”
Atul Gawande, The New Yorker
Minot, North Dakota, 50 miles south of the Canadian border, has been hit hard by Covid-19, and by conflict over the role of government in addressing a pandemic.
Circles in the Dirt
Rajiv Golla, The Assembly
In the back of the NASCAR pack, “former legends and young guns battle for a small pool of attention and an even smaller pool of money.”
My Mother, Meat Alternatives, and Me
Latria Graham, Gravy
When her mother, facing serious illness, gave up meat, the author had some adjusting to do.
Farmworkers face a life-and-death commute to Arizona’s lettuce fields
Esther Honig, Food & Environment Reporting Network and The Nation
“The pandemic turned an already difficult commute into a hazardous and potentially deadly endeavor.”
Hot Boy Summer
Jazmine Hughes, The New York Times Magazine
Lil Nas X has endured “both the judgment of the church and the crueler corners of the internet, transgressing the former to find solace in the latter.”
We Went to Vegas to Wring Joy From Heartbreak
Mitchell S. Jackson, The New York Times Magazine
A story of lifelong male friendship at a time of loss.
What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?
Brooke Jarvis, The New York Times Magazine
As the pandemic claims so many people’s olfactory senses, a report from the frontiers of smell science.
The wildfire was everywhere. Could a school bus driver and 22 kids find a way out?
Lizzie Johnson, The Washington Post
“You’d better be a good driver,” said one of the teachers.
The Lives of Others
Lindsay Jones, The Atavist
Two men, switched at birth in Come by Chance, Newfoundland, discover they weren’t alone.
Blood, Lies, and a Drug Trials Lab Gone Bad
Brendan I. Koerner, Wired
At this lab, you don’t want to be the employee with good veins.
What Do We Do About John James Audubon?
J. Drew Lanham, Audubon
The birders’ god was a racist slaveowner, and maybe also “in denial of his own identity.”
Is There a Right Way to Act Blind?
Andrew Leland, The New York Times Magazine
The protest of a TV show sends the author on an exploration of disability and performance.
The Crow Whisperer
Lauren Markham, Harper’s
“I’m just an old punk rocker,” says Yvette Buigues, “who happens to be able to communicate with animals.”
Among the Insurrectionists
Luke Mogelson, The New Yorker
One of the most intimate accounts of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, with the most context.
American Democracy Is Only 55 Years Old—And Hanging by a Thread
Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic
“We were taught that Black folks had been granted a fundamental right in perpetuity” when the Voting Rights Act passed. “In truth the boundaries and contours of that right were in flux.”
The Deep and Twisted Roots of the American Yam
Lex Pryor, The Ringer
A haunting essay about “robbery, reinvention, and identity.” And sweet potatoes.
Twenty Years Gone
Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic
A family struggles to come to terms with 9/11.
He Thought He Could Outfox the Gig Economy. He Was Wrong.
Lauren Smiley, Wired
The story of a San Francisco DoorDash driver whose minivan was stolen — with his kids inside — and a deeper exploration of the culture and rotten economics of gig work.
We Were the Last of the Nice Negro Girls
Anna Deavere Smith, The Atlantic
What happened in 1968 when seven young women became the Beaver College Blacks.
Black Lives Are Shorter in Chicago. My Family’s History Shows Why.
Linda Villarosa, The New York Times Magazine
“How did a Promised Land to generations of Black families become a community of lost lives?”
Kyle Rittenhouse, American Vigilante
Paige Williams, The New Yorker
The most authoritative profile of the Kenosha shooter.
2020
How Gillian Welch and David Rawlings Held Onto Optimism
Hanif Abdurraqib, The New York Times Magazine
Even during a catastrophe year, it’s possible to find creative energy, as this profile of a great songwriting duo shows.
Stuck in Central China on Coronavirus Lockdown and
Evacuation from China, Quarantine in the UK: A Covid-19 Dispatch
Lavender Au, New York Review of Books
The writer was locked down in Hubei Province and then quarantined in London. (Possible paywall.)
Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess
Doug Bock Clark, GQ
Two weeks aboard an infected cruise ship.
Healing, Slowly, in Cookeville
Monic Ducton, Oxford American
As the author’s Tennessee town recovers from a tornado, it is dealing with a new disaster.
12 Minutes and a Life
Mitchell S. Jackson, Runner’s World
Ahmaud Arbery, killed while running in South Georgia, was more than a viral video.
What I Want to Know of Kindness
Devin Kelly, Longreads
A runner’s meditation on masculinity, suffering, and grace.
What I Learned When My Husband Got Coronavirus
Jessica Lustig, The New York Times Magazine
The pandemic, up close, in one household.
Deliverance
Lauren Markham, The Atavist
What happens after a seemingly telekinetic young woman is convicted of killing her daughter.
Miranda’s Rebellion
Stephanie McCrummen, The Washington Post
A complex profile of a 39-year-old Georgia woman trying to discern her own political worldview at a liminal moment.
What Didn’t Kill Her
Bernice L. McFadden, Longreads
The author’s mother survived numerous calamities only to face two existential threats at once.
This Is How You Live When the World Falls Apart
Jon Mooallem, The New York Times
As we are called to be our best selves, here are 100,000 role models: the residents of Anchorage after the 1964 quake.
My Mustache, My Self
Wesley Morris, The New York Times Magazine
A Covid mustache grown on a dare launches an exploration of the author’s Blackness.
A Friendship, a Pandemic, and a Death Beside the Highway
Basharat Peer, The New York Times
A photo of two young men, one cradling the other, leads the author to a village in India and “the first wave of coronavirus ‘refugees’ in the world.”
“The Pandemic is a Portal”
Arundhati Roy, Financial Times
Watching the crisis unfold in India and the United States, each with its separate ills.
The Dognapping of the Century
Olivia Rutigliano, Truly Adventurous
A Victorian true tale of poetry, romance, thuggery, and ransom.
Racism’s Hidden Toll
Robert Samuels, The Washington Post
An intimate look at George Floyd’s life through the lens of mental health and discrimination.
Stranger Than Fiction
Oscar Schwartz, The Atavist
Poet Steven Klett got a job at Falun Gong’s Epoch Times and learned the perils of clickbait and disinformation.
Their Son’s Heart Saved His Life. So He Rode 1,426 Miles to Meet Them.
A.C. Shilton, Bicycling
A story of organ donation and radical gratitude.
Persian Letters
Nilo Tabrizy, n+1
Communicating secretly, the Iranian-born author and her “twin flame” in Iran construct a visceral picture of the protests across that country, and the brutal crackdown.
To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past
Nicholas Thompson, Wired
On mortality and perseverance.
My Instagram
Dayna Tortorici, n+1
A meditation on social media as the “nth circle of hell where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift, over and over again.”
“A Terrible Price”
Linda Villarosa, The New York Times Magazine
A visit to New Orleans’ Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club illuminates the deadly racial disparities of Covid-19.
The Accusation
Sarah Viren, The New York Times Magazine
What happens when a false harassment charge seems to barrel out of nowhere.
Trying to Parent My Black Teenagers Through Protest and Pandemic
Carvell Wallace, The New York Times Magazine
It’s a balance between existential dread and burritos.
Voices from the Fight
The staff of The Washington Post
An oral history of the four-year movement to prevent President Trump’s reelection.
2019
Rick Steves Wants to Set You Free
Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine
This profile of the evangelist of lean, experiential travel goes unexpected places.
The Jungle Prince of Delhi
Ellen Barry, The New York Times
A story of imperialism, loneliness, myth-making, mental illness, family dysfunction, and collective trauma, set in a 14th-century hunting lodge om India.
Remembering the Woman Who Was My Second Mother in Cuba
Ruth Behar, Sapiens
A tribute to the author’s nanny in Cuba in the 1950s and the keeper of her family’s memories for decades afterward.
The Long Road Home
Deborah Barfield Berry and Kelley Benham French, USA Today
When Wanda Tucker traveled to Angola. “she did so on the faith of her connection” to some of the first people enslaved on this continent. “But she was also doing it for the millions of African-Americans who don’t have the name of an ancestor to claim.”
In Search of Emiliano Sala
Sam Borden, ESPN
An elegantly structured story of a soccer player whose single-engine plane went down.
The Gospel According to Marianne Williamson
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Magazine
A profile of the presidential candidate and self-help author, which starts breezy and ends with a gut punch.
The American Missionary and the Uncontacted Tribe
Doug Bock Clark, GQ
John Chau, a 26-year-old U.S. missionary, was killed while trying to evangelize on an island where he was neither allowed nor welcome. Clark burrows deep into his history.
How This Con Man’s Wild Testimony Sent Dozens to Jail, and 4 to Death Row
Pam Colloff, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica
In their quest for convictions, prosecutors overlooked the fact that Paul Skalnik was, in official parlance, a “con artist of the highest degree.”
A black principal, four white teens and the ‘senior prank’ that became a hate crime
Jessica Contrera, The Washington Post
A morally clear feature that resists the temptation to tie neat narrative bows at the end.
Angels in East Texas
Wes Ferguson, Texas Monthly
Reaching back into his own past, Ferguson revisits the blowback from when Kilgore College presented Tony Kushner’s AIDS drama in 1999.
The Death and Life of Frankie Madrid
Valeria Fernández, California Sunday
What happened after a young gay man, a childhood arrival to the United States, was deported to Mexico.
They Had It Coming
Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic
An insider’s view of the college admissions scandal.
The Harrowing Hours and Defiant Aftermath of the New Zealand Mosque Shootings
Sean Flynn, GQ
Intervowen narratives of brutality and redemption.
How Do You Reclaim a Massacre?
Cynthia R. Greenlee, Gen
Forty years after the Klan assassination of five activists in Greensboro, the debate over language persists.
What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say
John Hendrickson, The Atlantic
A look at the former vice president’s stutter, written by a fellow stutterer.
America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine
The author wondered why her father, who grew up under Jim Crow, served in the Army, and never escaped the service economy, flew an American flag every day. “My father knew exactly what he was doing,” she writes in this essay, part of The 1619 Project.
Utah Town Once Run by Polygamist Cult Leader Warren Jeffs Exorcises Its Ghosts
Tarpley Hitt, The Daily Beast
Hildale, Utah was once ruled with “paranoid Orwellian excess” by a polygamous-Mormon-leader-cum-rapist. Not it’s making a lurching transition to democracy.
Faith, Friendship, and Tragedy at Santa Fe High
Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly
The story of a Pakistani exchange student, her evangelical Christian friend, and a school shooting, reported over the long haul.
What Would Mister Rogers Do?
Tom Junod, The Atlantic
A meditation on how would the champion of kindness might respond to this most uncivil moment.
The Unbreakable Bond
Mina Kines, ESPN
The story of football player DeAndre Hopkins’ relationship with his mother. Content warning for domestic violence.
I Bought an Elephant to Find Out How to Save Them
Paul Kvinta, Outside
While reporting an animal conservation story, the author helps acquire “two very large, no doubt emotionally scarred elephants that once worked as props in a cabaret act in a Lao parking lot.”
His mom has never seen him play
Tonya Malinowski, ESPN
On the U.S.-Mexico border, a football team’s stories are “defined by fences, fears, bridges and marked SUVs.”
My Brother’s Passing, God, and the Origins of Life
Charles Mudede, The Stranger
This essay starts with a brother’s terminal cancer diagnosis and cascades into the primordial origins of life, the nature of matter and anti-matter, and the complicated structure of water.
The Barbaric History of Sugar in America
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The New York Times Magazine
An industry made possible by the slave economy is now killing the descendants of those enslaved workers. Part of The 1619 Project.
An Addict, a Nurse, and a Christmas Resurrection
Suzanne Ohlmann, Longreads
“I once cared for a patient who looked like Jesus and, after 40 days in a coma, rose from the dead on my shift.”
The Great American Press Release
Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Oxford American
“I sit in my own car in my own driveway with both hands gripping the steering wheel so that I don’t appear dangerous. My tie chafes my neck. So much for class privilege.”
Fear, Misinformation, and Measles Spread in Brooklyn
Amanda Schaffer, Wired
How an epidemic spread along a vector of misinformation.
Folk Like Us
John Jeremiah Sullivan, The New Yorker
In profiling musician Rhiannon Giddens, one North Carolina genius writes about another.
The Beating Heart
Gene Weingarten, Washington Post Magazine
Doctors transplanted a sullen murderer’s heart into the body of a 20-year-old nursing student. This retelling, 33 years later, made my own heart pound.
Jailed Raped Deported Robbed
Elliott Woods, The New Republic and the Pulitzer Center
Audemio Orózco Ramirez spent most of a quarter-century raising a family in the United States. He had a federal work permit and legal ID. Then came a routine ICE check-in.
The Florida Shuffle
Colton Wooten, The New Yorker
The author fuses his own unflinching addiction with a critique of Florida’s detox industry and the system that enables its abuses.
2018
Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times
A profile of the figure skater, twenty-four years after the kneecapping of Nancy Kerrigan.
What Do We Owe Her Now?
Elizabeth Bruenig, The Washington Post
A high-school cheerleader reported her rape immediately, only to be ostracized from her Texas community and dismissed by prosecutors.
The Newlyweds
Mansi Choksi, Harper’s
A northern Indian couple defied their family to marry. A shelter promised to protect them.
The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage
Doug Clark, GQ
The Trump administration claims the University of Virginia student was tortured in North Korea. Was he? Or was that a fictional pretext for saber rattling?
I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
A meditation on African-American artists, the weight of celebrity, private pain, and betrayal.
The Southern Strategist
Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker
The Rev. William Barber II, founder of North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement, is taking on his next (national) act—”driven by a fugitive hope that an ancestral breach might finally be cemented.”
This Sand is Your Sand
Chris Colin, Outside
The author reported on the centuries-old battle over public access to nature in the best possible way: by renting a canoe, paddling the Russian River, and making landfall at the most contested shorelines.
Ghosts of Highway 20
Noelle Crombie, The Oregonian
A multimedia series that tells the story of a serial murderer whose spree might have been prevented if police had believed a woman he raped in the 1970s. (Trigger warning for violence against women.)
A Betrayal
Hannah Dreier, ProPublica and New York
A Long Island teen tried to extricate himself from a gang he never wanted to be in and became an FBI informant. As a result, he was targeted by the feds for deportation and by the gang for assassination.
Sentenced to Death
Kathy Dobie, Rolling Stone
Neil Early, “136 pounds soaking wet” and built “like a giant grasshopper,” was sentenced to a private prison for shoplifting DVDs. Three years later he was dead.
The Lottery Hackers
Jason Fagone, Highline
A retired Michigan couple figured out how to game the sweepstakes in two states.
Trashed
Kiera Feldman, ProPublica
Inside the deadly world of private garbage collection.
The Real Story of the Hawaiian Missile Crisis
Sean Flynn, GQ
A tick-tock from the day millions of Hawaiians prepared to die.
Things Fall Apart
Allyn Gaestel, The Atavist
Ostensibly about a the collapse of a floating school in Lagos, Nigeria, this story is really about “the myths that people want to believe about the world [and] the spectrum between honesty and deceit.”
The Obsessive Search for the Tasmanian Tiger
Brooke Jarvis, The New Yorker
Covering far more than a single species’ extinction, this story is also about imperialism and genocide, and why we attach so much freight to fleeting sightings and the prospect of “ecological do-overs.”
Jonestown’s Victims Have a Lesson to Teach Us, So I Listened
Jamilah King, Mother Jones
“For years, I’d heard vague stories, about aunties and cousins who went off to Guyana and disappeared. But… the more I asked people in my community about Jonestown and Peoples Temple, the more I came to understand how close it still is to the surface of everyday life.”
Mission Accomplished
Tonya Malinowski, ESPN The Magazine
A soccer ball miraculously survived the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. It returned to space 30 years later.
The Counterfeit Queen of Soul
Jeff Maysh, Smithsonian
A soul singer hopped a bus and followed a scam artist to her own kidnapping, where she was forced to impersonate Aretha Franklin.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Bryan Mealer, The Guardian
A liberal Christian, and the outlier in a family of religious conservatives, drives from Texas to Washington, D.C. with his 93-year-old Trump-loving cousin.
The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t
Rachel Monroe, The Atlantic
A con-man story with some justice at the end.
Where there’s a will, is there a wage?
Robert Samuels, The Washington Post
An innovative piece of digital storytelling that tells the interwoven stories of two Omahans working to get their lives on track.
As border crossings surge, a Mexican couple tests Trump’s policies
Kevin Sieff, The Washington Post
“They looked up old text messages from their employer in Florida on their phone. ‘Your W-2 is ready,’ one message said… Then they called the smuggler. He confirmed: Two chances left.”
Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook—and the World
Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, Wired
An investigative dive into the unintended consequences of global social networks.
When Winter Never Ends
Wright Thompson, ESPN The Magazine
A profile of Ichiro Suzuki, a Japanese baseball player staring down his own mortality.
Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies are in a Life-or-Death Crisis
Linda Villarosa, The New York Times
The lived experiences of African-American women kills mothers and their infants at outsized rates.
He Helped Build an Artists’ Utopia. Now He Faces Trial for 36 Deaths There.
Elizabeth Weil, The New York Times Magazine
Should Max Harris, who was second in command at the Ghost Ship but had no real power, be sitting in jail and facing manslaughter charges for the blaze that killed 36?
2017
The Lost Children of Tuam
Dan Barry, The New York Times
An Irish woman has given her life to investigating her town’s long-closed home for illegitimate children—”an awful lonely ould hole”—and its terrible secrets.
Snowden’s Box
Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, Harper’s
A yarn about journalism and a chilling account of the depth of our surveillance state.
He Became a Hate Crime Victim. She Became a Widow.
Audra D.S. Burch, The New York Times
What one man shouted in anger and one woman uttered in grief capture one of America’s most troubling intersections.
Lost in Cypress Creek
Susan Carroll and Lomi Kriel, Houston Chronicle
A DACA recipient and his friends came to Houston on a rescue mission during Hurricane Harvey. Not all of them returned home.
America’s Most Political Food
Lauren Collins, The New Yorker
Barbecue, white supremacy, and generational responsibility in South Carolina.
Homeland Insecurity
Jack El-Hai, Minnesota Alumni
In the 1930s, 22 African-American were cast for a 1930s Soviet movie about the Black experience in the United States. One of them, Homer Smith, later became a war correspondent but would never really feel at home anywhere.
The Life Truths I Learned in the Mountains
Mike Graff, Success
“I’m not playing your game anymore. I played your game and you won. Fine. But guess what? Your game’s stupid.”
“The Only Good Muslim Is a Dead Muslim”
Ted Genoways, The New Republic and FERN
What happened when terrorist trio tried took aim at Somali immigrants in a Kansas meatpacking town.
Dirty John
Christopher Goffard, The Los Angeles Times
A six-part series about a California con man who lured an interior designer into marriage with tales of working with Doctors Without Borders as an anesthesiologist in Iraq.
The Resegregation of Jefferson County
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine
An Alabama town tried to secede from its school district. It’s one example of how the tenuous structure of equal opportunity is eroding.
51 Inches
Mike Hixenbaugh, Davin Hunn, and Mark Collette, Houston Chronicle
Five lives caught up in Hurricane Harvey.
The Living Disappeared
Bridget Huber, California Sunday
The search for a brother who, as an infant, disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship.
Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice
Frances Lee, catalystwedco.com and Autostraddle
On the danger of purity tests.
‘Love Thy Neighbor?’
Stephanie McCrummen, The Washington Post
A Muslim doctor in a small Minnesota town grapples with the 2016 election results takes such an unexpected turn.
One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die
Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine
A profile of B.J. Miller, palliative-care pioneer and triple amputee.
At His Own Wake, Celebrating Life and the Gift of Death
Catherine Porter, The New York Times
The final days of John Shields, who used a new law allowing some terminally ill Canadians to choose euthanasia.
Losing Gloria
Lizzie Presser, California Sunday
When Gloria Marin was seized from her home in 2010, bound for deportation, her four minor children were left behind in Phoenix. This is the story of a family blown apart.
A Showdown Over Sharia
Robert Samuels, The Washington Post
A white militia member and a Muslim meet at Dairy Queen in Ferris, Texas to talk about their differences. Each brings a weapon and a friend.
The Untold Story of the Bastille Day Attacker
Scott Sayare, GQ
A meticulously reported, vividly written account of the July 2016 truck attack in Nice.
‘The Way to Survive It Was to Make A’s’
Mosi Secret, The New York Times Magazine
The story of “the quietest, most successful integration program carried on in our country”: the effort to send young African-American men to elite prep schools.
M.I.A.
Matthew Shaer, The Atavist
An American soldier goes missing in Laos and then reappears in Vietnam—maybe— 44 years later.
Inside the world’s largest refugee camp, one man’s quest to explain Donald Trump
Kevin Sieff, The Washington Post
The view from a makeshift city of 300,000 residents, including 14,500 in the U.S. refugee pipeline.
Becoming a Steelworker Liberated Her. Then Her Job Moved to Mexico.
Farah Stockman, The New York Times
A profile of steelworker Shannon Mulcahy as she trains a Mexican counterpart to take over the job that “anchored her otherwise tumultuous life.”
The Two Americans
Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times
A story of grace, unmerited but freely given, in western Arkansas.
A Racing Mind
Tommy Tomlinson, ESPN The Magazine
A profile of NASCAR racer Dale Earnhardt Jr. as he planned his post-concussion comeback.
America’s Hidden H.I.V. Epidemic
Linda Villarosa, The New York Times Magazine
If gay and bisexual African-American men made up a country, its HIV infection rate would be the highest in the world. A report from Mississippi.
The Last Days of Darryl Hunt
Phoebe Zerwick, Duke Law School
After an exoneration and a suicide in North Carolina comes this reflective, deeply reported, beautifully paced story about the permanent damage that wrongful imprisonment can cause.
